Resistance and Continuance through Cultural Connections in Simon J.
Ortiz's Out There SomewherePATRICE HOLLRAH

89

Morning Star SongKIMBERLY ROPPOLO

93

The Work That Must Be DoneDANIEL HEATH JUSTICE

96

Revisiting the Regenerative Possibilities of OrtizMATTHEW E. DUQUÈS

99

Tribute to Simon J. OrtizROBIN RILEY FAST

101

Prairie Songs and Poor PrayersKATHRYN W. SHANLEY

103

Telling Our DaughtersROBERT M. NELSON

108

Many Thanks, Simon, for a Wonderful GiftCARTER REVARD

111

Contributor Biographies

{1}

Special Issue
In Honor of Simon J. Ortiz

Volume 16, Number 4

GUEST EDITOR, SUSAN BERRY
BRILL DE RAMÍREZ

{2}

{BLANK PAGE}

{3}

INTRODUCTION

"A Spring Wind Rising . . . Listen. You Can
Hear It"

SUSAN BERRY BRILL DE RAMÍREZ

This special issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures is devoted to the
work of Simon J. Ortiz. It is a gift and an honor to serve as this issue's guest editor.
For me, since first hearing Native American literature over twenty years ago at a reading in
Gallup and first studying native literatures in classes taught by Luci
Tapahonso at the University of New Mexico, Simon Ortiz's work has been a constant focal point
in my experience with and understandings of Native American
and, more broadly, American and global literary traditions. I see Simon's work within a global
literary tradition of writers who offer us their words and lives as a
lens or light by which we can better perceive and understand what it means to be human during
times when far too many have forgotten: writers such as
Sophocles, Solomon in his Song, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar,
William Carlos Williams, Wittgenstein, Lorine Niedecker, Edmund Jabés,
Leslie Marmon Silko, Buchi Emecheta, and Simon J. Ortiz. As Ortiz reminds us over and over
again, what we need to know is actually very simple and, thereby,
profound in that simplicity: "He thought about stone, water, fire, and air. / And he had to believe
it was possible--some men / didn't know or had forgotten."1
Three common elements pervade the
work of each of these writers: a commitment to this world and the betterment of people's lives, a
sense of the
sonorous harmony and power of orality and storytelling, and a conscious respect of and
engagement with the sacred in its various manifestations. Each of these
writers brings the wisdom and history of their respective ancestral traditions interwoven with
{4} the joy and beauty of creation. Whether it is Lorine
working
scrubbing floors while producing remarkable poetry in the traditions of Dickinson and Williams;
or Sophocles creating Oedipus at Colonnus as an
eighty-year-old man; Paul Laurence Dunbar and Buchi Emecheta, on opposite sides of the
Atlantic, crossing lines of race and gender to cry their people's hopes
and suffering; or Solomon, Wittgenstein, and Jabés articulating their diverse Judaic
traditions with humor and pain; in the work of each of these souls, there is a
magic here that their readers can touch, that has oral texture, that in its deepest sense is ennobling
in its reminder of our humanity in this world of ours. This is
what Ortiz's writing does, too. In his recent poetry collection Out There
Somewhere, there is an Acoma poem whose English language title is "This Is the Way
Still We Shall Go On" in which Ortiz tells us: "It is necessary to look back to the past. / Gazing
we will see how our peoples in the past lived, / . . . / We who are
living today, that is what we are to be guided by";2 and a few pages later in "It Is
No Longer the Same as It Was in the Olden Days": "We must continue to be. /
It is necessary. / With courage [. . .] / That is the way still we must keep on
going."3
This issue of SAIL
begins with new work by Ortiz, an excerpt from a larger manuscript. It is important to begin with
Simon's own words and with his
offering that speaks of the desecration and destruction of "Three round kivas. Walls of stone. / . .
. the uncovered homesite. / Kaamah-tsaishruuh. A sacred
place"4--a destruction that paved the way for the very interstate highway that so
many of us traveled on our ways to Albuquerque and the University of New
Mexico. An earlier yet previously unpublished interview with Ortiz by University of New
Mexico Professor David Dunaway is next. Although this interview is
from 1988, it is especially helpful in juxtaposition with the essays and tribute pieces that follow. I
decided to begin and end this collection with two elders in the
field of native literary study: Roger Dunsmore and Carter Revard. The first three essays by
Dunsmore, Sarah Ann Wider, and David L. Moore were first
presented, along with a reading by Simon, at the MLA session devoted to Simon's work. This
session initiated the work towards this issue, and it is fitting that
these essays, too, come first.{5}
The next selections turn to the early
years that led to what has been called the Native American Literary Renaissance. Joy Harjo,
Evelina Zuni Lucero, and
Laura Tohe share moving stories from those times, powerfully articulating the crucial role Simon
Ortiz played in the development of the burgeoning field of
native literatures and in the lives of so many native writers. From Arizona, Joni Adamson speaks
directly to Simon's role in his commitment to environmental
justice issues in the southwest. From these voices, the next set of longer essays by literature
scholars follows. P. Jane Hafen begins this group with an essay that
emphasizes the importance of "Centering the Voice of Simon Ortiz" within his tribal and, more
broadly, Pueblo historical and cultural traditions. Kenneth M.
Roemer turns specifically to Acoma Pueblo (Aacqu) in an essay that, like Dunsmore's, looks at
the building of a wall, its care and deliberation (which contrasts
sharply with the destruction of those walls and kivas in "Children of Fire, Children of Water").
This group of essays ends with Patrice Hollrah's piece that places
Ortiz's "resistance and continuance" within a cultural framework.
The next three pieces offer the voices
of a younger generation of writers and scholars. With her beautiful and poignant poem "Morning
Star Song,"
Kimberly Roppolo (one of the new generation of native writers and scholars) honors Ortiz's past
and continuing legacy. Her poem is followed by a tribute from
Daniel Heath Justice who speaks as a young native colleague of Simon's at the University of
Toronto. Dartmouth graduate student Matthew E. Duquès writes of
the regenerative power of Ortiz's work and its vital importance for his high school students on the
Navajo reservation. The final grouping begins with poetry
scholar Robin Riley Fast who echoes Duquès in her tribute to Simon's commitment to
"the restorative potential in the human spirit and in the natural world." This
issue concludes with three scholars who have given much to further the field of native literary
study, Kathryn Shanley, Robert Nelson, and Carter Revard. Kate
Shanley reminds us that in Simon's writing, we are offered stories that move beyond indigenous
survival and towards a sacred "space of grace and forgiveness."
Both Nelson and Revard also show us the transforming power of Simon's work that touches
people's lives, deeply {6} and generationally: each
turning to the
origins of life in the formation and birth of a child.
In the pages that follow, each reader is
invited as a listener-reader to step into the worlds engendered by Simon Ortiz's life and work. As
the centripetal
force within this issue, each essay, story, and poem interweaves with the others as part of the
larger, unfolding story of what I see as a categorically radical shift
in the present and future of written literature, literary scholarship, and higher learning. Simon
reminds all of us over and over again of our crucial responsibilities
to our communities and to recognize that our communities include the whole world, that our
work must be integrally committed to the betterment of human
lives, that we must be anxiously concerned with our times and each other. Art for art's sake has
no place here. Ivory towers are irrelevant. New paradigms are
emerging. The scholarship herein is important, not only because it helps us to understand Simon's
work more fully, which it does, but also because it shows us
the future of an engaged and integrally conversive scholarship. Simon reminds us of the
importance of work that is transforming, and all of the writers in this
issue, too, do so through their respective poetic, storied, and essayed insights into the life and
work of Simon J. Ortiz. Each piece is one story and part of the
larger story that unfolds itself throughout these pages and, more importantly, throughout the
writing and life of Simon. This is scholarship that steps varyingly
outside the more staid and distanced critical theories of "the western tradition." Each offering
herein speaks with an intersubjective voice that speaks from
knowledge that is both reasoned and heartfelt and, thereby, informed by the deep quality of
Simon's storytelling voice that strengthens and encourages us all
toward a creative writing and scholarship that is integrally invested in the good of the
world.
Ortiz speaks the realities of one
Acoma man's, of indigenous people's, and possibly all people's lives and struggles in the face of
colonizing oppression and
genocide that is horrifically relevant on a global scale today. Simon's writing is poetry for his
Acoma and Pueblo people. It is poetry for all native peoples. It is
poetry for indigenous peoples worldwide. It is poetry for us all. Simon is remarkable as a poet, a
storyteller, an educator, and an activist. When I look at the {7}
range of his writing, I see the future of global literatures . . . and also the glimmer of new
directions for philosophy, history, psychology, sociology, and folklore
and language studies. It makes poignant sense that, as Alexie points out, Simon has been
understudied and underappreciated. Simon's work, both ancient and
new, opens up worlds that few in academia today are prepared to understand and evaluate clearly.
In this issue of SAIL, nineteen scholars and writers help us to
understand the place of Simon J. Ortiz at the beginning of this twenty-first century CE.
I would like to thank all those whose
voices and persons and words inform this issue: scholars and writers alike. I would also like to
thank all those whose
support helped move this volume forward and whose voices are in these pages in spirit if not in
writing: Alex Kuo, Sherman Alexie, Ellen Arnold, Dean Rader,
Gwen Griffin, Kimberly Blaeser, Gordon Henry, Philip Red Eagle, Robin Riley Fast, Bernard
Hirsch, Joyzelle Godfrey, Kate Winona Shanley, Deborah Miranda,
Ginny Carney, Susan Scarberry-García, Janice Gould, Jeff Berglund, Ron Welburn,
Andrew Wiget, as well as those at the SAIL helm and main office, editor
Malea Powell, L. Rain Cranford, Mark Wojcik, and Tina Urbain, and Mary Johnson for her
thorough copyediting. Evelina Zuni Lucero provided additional
editorial assistance with final changes to the introduction. I thank you all. Finally, as a
Bahá'i, it is important that I thank God for being able to be of service in
bringing this issue of SAIL together. This introduction concludes with a selected
bibliography of Simon Ortiz's published volumes over the years.

NOTES

1. Ortiz, After and Before
the Lightning, 38.
2. Ortiz, Out There
Somewhere, 92.
3. Ortiz, Out There
Somewhere, 98.
4. Ortiz, "Excerpt from `Children of
Fire, Children of Water: Memory and Trauma,'" SAIL 16.4 (Winter
2004):9-11.

Three round kivas. Walls of stone.
Upright and perpendicular to sky.
And to the land sloping away
to the east where flood waters
from Kaweshtima flowed.
Dirt under our shoes.
Dirt on our hands.
We looked at the uncovered homesite.
Kaamah-tsaishruuh. A sacred place.
Holy homeplace. Stone walls.
I didn't know what to say to Larry.
What could I say?
What could I explain?
Duwaa-sha-ah haatse.
This is our land.
He was four years old in 1960.
I was nineteen years old in 1960.
This is our land.
An uncle guide, advisor, counselor.
Protector and teacher.
What could I say?
What is the explanation then?
Is there any explanation possible?
A highway is to be built through here.
Our ancestors lived here long ago. {10}
Baabahtitra eh Naanahtitra.
Grandmothers and Grandfathers.
They built the kivas and the walls.
Now another people have come.
They have gained right of way.
Soon the kamaah-tsaishruuh will vanish.
What kind explanation is that?

In 1999 my lawyer son could have gone to prison upon conviction of a felony charge he was
facing. For assaulting another Indian lawyer with a knife. There was
alcohol involved. You've heard it before. It is an old story. It has become a classic story. Yes,
you've heard it before. I'm sure you have. It is Indian fighting
Indian. It is a colonized man fighting another colonized man. Like I said, it's an old story. When
the legal and judicial process was ended and things had settled
down, my son came "home" to speak with his mother and me. Afterward he returned to his job in
Washington, D.C., and tried to put the sundered pieces of his
life together again. Soon I received a letter from him, saying, "I want to come home." It was a
plaintive, simple statement: I want to come home. The plaintive
and simple statement became a question for me: Where and what is home anymore? For a Native
American, where and what is "home" anymore? Before the
reservation system was put into place by the federal government, Indigenous lands were
homelands. That was where home was. It was easy to know where home
was. But after Indigenous lands were designated reservations, the idea of home changed. The
plaintive and simple statement became an ambiguous question: Has
the concept of "home" changed so much for Indian people they do not know what they are talking
about? And further, it has become the question: What's home anymore?
My four-year-old nephew Larry stood
by the open pit of the Indigenous "ruin," looking into the circular kivas and staring at the upright
stone walls that had
been violated by the researchers who peceded the construction engineers. And that would soon
be obliterated by the interstate highway construction. Piles of
sand, clay, crumbled stone, and tiny bits of shattered pottery shards lay to the {11} side in mounds. Archeological and anthropological
researchers had been there
from the local university. The mounds were their debris. As his teacher, adviser, counselor,
protector, what could I say to my beloved nephew Larry? What could
I explain? This is the land of our ancestor grandmothers and grandfathers. Therefore this land is
our land too. Could I say that? Should I have said that? Could I
explain and identify who tore open the kaamah-tsaishruh, the sacred place? Who could I say gave
the permission for the destruction to happen? What was the
authority cited when the walls of the ancient homesite were destroyed? What kind of explanation
would that have been?

NOTE

"Children of Fire, Children of Water" is a collaborative, dialogic creative nonfiction project
currently being written by Simon J. Ortiz, University of Toronto, and
Gabriella Schwab, University of California-Irvine.

{12}

An Interview with Simon Ortiz

July 14, 1988

DAVID DUNAWAY

SIMON ORTIZ: My family comes from the Acoma Pueblo
reservation west of Albuquerque and, specifically, at McCartys on the New Mexico state maps,
right off
the Interstate 40.

DAVID DUNAWAY: Did you grow up in Acoma?

SO: I grew up in the Acoma Pueblo community, at McCartys.
McCartys is one of the villages, the other village is Acomita, and other additional small
settlements
at Anzac and some newer ones. I grew up there for the first twenty years of my life.

DD: So what was McCartys and the Acoma community like in
the '40s and '50s?

SO: It was the war, World War II, of course, and the life there
was sort of on the edge of something new happening. The war was going on, I remember that
there were young men who were uniform, going off somewhere, to California, wherever that
was, and there were trains passing on the railroad, which runs about
a mile north of my mother's house, and there were always these war things going up and down,
west and east, and things happening like that.
Acoma and McCartys, the little
village, was very small at that time, and it didn't seem to be any more world out there except
what was passing through. It
was a very small community and I grew up within the community which was family, clan,
grandparents, mother, and father. Although, obviously, changes that
had been taking place for many, many decades and in the past two hundred or so years--three
hundred or so years--was very much impressioned upon me as a
{13} child of the 1940s. There was something going on,
mysterious, and, of course, somewhat fearful.
I found that when I started school that
this world that was outside of Acoma and McCartys was so different, because most of that world
and the exposure
that I had to it was through reading--what I read, anyway, in the pages in the schoolbooks--was
not really the Acoma and the Indian world in general. It was
always some white-picket-fence in the West, or perhaps in California. When I was very young,
things were changing so fast. The atomic bomb was exploded
right at the beginning of my life. I was born in 1941, right at the beginning of that war. And in
1945 and the changes that were wrought by the war, and
especially the bomb, you know, are a part of the history that I was living. I didn't really know it,
of course, as a child, just that it was happening. I think that the
changes were exemplified by school, by the railroad, and the men, leaving. My father was a
railroad worker. I didn't learn any English until I went to school at
McCartys's day school, which was then a BIA federal school, when I was six, seven years
old.

DD: Was it a rural environment?

SO: Very much so. Pueblo Indian people traditionally are
agricultural people, cultivating the land with the traditional crops of corn, chile, pumpkin, beans,
squash, those kinds of things. Bottom lands along the Rio de San Jose, which originates in the
Zuni Mountains, were used for the growing of these crops, and
then dry-farming in the Acoma valley, which is twelve more miles to the south, which is the
traditional home--mother home site--of the Acoma people.
I was born actually at the old
Albuquerque Indian Hospital, here, in Albuquerque, and from there on I lived at home until I was
about nineteen, when I went
away to school--college--for the first time. In a couple of those years, because my father was a
railroad worker for the Santa Fe Railroad, we lived in California, I
think, when I was very young, when I was a baby. And then later on, when I was in the fifth
grade, I remember, we went to Skull Valley, to go to school for one
year. And then there were, I think, several occasions, briefly, when we went to California again,
to be with my father. A lot of the employment for wage income
was for the railroad in the 1940s.{14}
So, after nineteen years of age, I've
been away from the Acoma homeland, until last year, in 1987, when I returned to live at
McCartys. Much of my work
as a writer, as a teacher, takes me away from home, obviously, but there is always, and has
always been, I think, with all the Acoma people, and, perhaps, with all
the Indian people in the country, a real connection and a real sense of home, and it's always with
the community, as a society and the community as a people, and
land, the environment, cultural, spiritual, political, social, economic, and so forth.

DD: Do you recall any groups of artists that you particularly
enjoyed listening to when you were young?

so: My father was a singer, in the Acoma tradition. He made songs and he sang songs that
were from the ageless tradition. My mother also was a singer; she
sang, also Acoma songs that are part of stories, hunting songs with my father--hunting prayer
songs when my father would go hunting in the fall time. And she
also sang church music. The Catholic church, of course, is very prominent in the pueblo
communities, and I learned church songs, the Catholic ritual, the
Gregorian chants back when. And, over the radio, I remember songs--early Elvis, you know, of
course that was later on in the mid-fifties or so. But songs,
popular music. Jimmy Dorsey, you know. Tommy Dorsey, those kinds. And, of course, since my
sisters were teenagers, you know, they sang songs that they
learned from the radio. He would sing railroad songs, folk songs from Jimmy Rogers or older
folk songs, set into the context of the Acoma cultural life.

DD: Could you tell us a little bit about Acoma
storytelling?

SO: The tradition of storytelling is part of the whole general
oral tradition. The oral tradition is not necessarily only stories, but stories of say, the olden times,
or
another time before us, or the generation before our present ones. . . . The oral tradition also
includes advice and counsel, that is, those items told to you by your
elders to ensure that you are living responsibly, that the relationships among family members are
correct and according to Acoma ways of life. There's also, of
course, stories told to children to make sure that they're attentive to the principles or philosophies
of the Acoma, and historical stories that include a look at the
Spanish civilization or settlement or colonization that occurred.{15}
Essentially I think everything is
story--in the sense that the tradition out of which poetry comes, and song comes, is like the story
of the life of a people.
That is, the culture survives because of the story of its birth, and goes on into its development
and goes on to the end of a cycle. One's personal life, for example,
begins with birth, although his personal story is only a continuation of a larger story; joined in
with that, it becomes a part of it and helps to continue it. The sense
of a story for me is important at least in two respects. One is that it's a kind of a lifeline that
connects the individual, me, back to that larger story. Two, it also
expresses for American Indian people something very distinct, in terms of culture, language, kind
of social structure, traditions, and so forth.
Stories in terms of what is written
down--printed literature--is usually seen as very authoritative and defined and scripted according
to certain rules. The
oral tradition, which is the source of myth, of mythology, is a sense of the spiritual reality that all
life is quite different. The oral tradition, in a sense, insists upon
that affirmation of life. The Western culture's written literature is a kind of definition of life
rather than the essence of life, which the oral tradition is, so that the
mythology is more than just, say, legends or tales or stories that have limited definition. Rather,
it's literature--I'll go ahead and use literature to refer to these oral
traditional texts--rather, this kind of literature has a spiritual dimension that doesn't necessarily,
say, only evoke a creative source, but rather includes that creative
source with what one's endeavors are as a human being.
Poetry is a part of that story as a form
of the oral tradition. I think that the oral tradition lends itself very well to the narrative form of
story, or the
narratives that stories are. And poetry is certainly included within prayer and song, a sense of
spirituality, a sense of being connected so inexplicably and forever
to that whole general story of life as we live and know it and practice it. I think poetry is
essentially story or language, language being an energy that forms us
and also at the same time is the essence of how we come into being. Poetry being a part of
language, then, is a part of this story of how we come into being.
In other words, the stories of this
literature, of the mythic propor-{16}tion, verify my
existence right now. If I know the story and accept the story of the
creation as told, as spoken, in that creative act of many millions and millions, trillions of years
ago when life began as atomic activity. . . . They're true. And, if I
accept them as true--when I accept them as true, then my existence is true. The literature, even
the great masterworks of Western literature, has an entirely
different purpose. It's more to define and even to limit it. Yet I think the oral tradition out of
which the present-day texts, ceremonial texts, come from, really lets
us realize ourselves, absolutely and completely.
Language has a kind of neutrality at
its very essence. There are different Indian languages in New Mexico: Navajo, and several
pueblo languages spoken.
These are the languages that were here when the Spanish conquest settlement introduced
European language and then later English and then others. Obviously
people's language changes as they learn it, but I think that values and perspectives continue as
long as there's not, say, political force and domination that begins
to limit it.
The use of English as a political
colonizing tool--weapon--was very useful to the settlement after the 1800s, in this part of the
Southwest. This of course
has changed the native, indigenous cultures of the United States Indian America. There are many
Indian people out there who are multilingual. People that are at
Acoma, at Santo Domingo, at Taos, at Jemez, who are, say, ceremonial, spiritual elders, leaders,
who speak English very well--maybe better than me--who speak
Spanish also, certainly better than me, who may speak other Indian languages, and yet they're still
within their traditional selves that they've always been. So it's a
contradiction perhaps, but I think that you have to recognize that the political nature of language
can be--is--really what limits us.
Southwestern writers have a kind of
consciousness that leads us to share identifiable images, metaphors that could only be
Southwestern geographically.
This, in terms of an identifiable place, makes us Southwestern writers. If there is a kind of
interface [among Southwestern writers], it is struggle. I mean, the
Southwest is essentially still a territory, colonized territory, colonial territory, so to speak. And I
know that John Nichols with his own work tries to bring this
out: the idea {17} that the land here and the lifestyle
culturally that has been lived by for centuries and thousands of years must resist the more
destructive
changes brought by Western expansionism, including even by the railroads, by land developers,
by uranium exploitation, by Los Alamos and Sandia National
Laboratories and the lack of planning and purely for economic profit, affecting people's
long-term lives and cultures.
For me, the landscape is just one vast,
engulfing, enclosing place. The far mountains, blue in the distance, the canyon lands, red, brown,
orange, yellow. The
plateau or semi-arid vistas, something so much forever and yet outlined in stark relief, giving it a
sense of immediacy--so that that sense of vista is not only one of
distance--out there--but also inside. And then, the landscape has given obvious inspiration to the
art forms that have evolved, the architecture of the Pueblo
people in an earlier, earlier tradition and epochs, you know, the cliff dwellings, the working with
stone so that it's part of the landscape. The music, obviously,
and the songs, using the drum and the songs which are muted, evoking a sense of that same
cooperation or adjustment and inspiration by the landscape to have a
certain style and form and content.
I think that literature that refers to
definite place names in the landscape, certain colors, the browns, and the dryness of the
land--which I use: the images of
blue skies that wait, like me, for rain to come from the west, and seeing the desert or our
homeland transformed when the rain does fall--those kinds of
environmental influences bring about inspiration. And more than that, the sense of how we have
to live in a relationship with the land. The land is severe in some
respects. It's hot, and it's pretty cold in the winter, and people faced with these forces can only be
wise to respond appropriately, and to utilize those forces of
nature. I think this lends a certain kind of linguistic outlook that also has that sense of
economy--breathing in only a certain way, a sense of rhythm that evokes
not grandiosity as a response, but certainly taking very great care with what you do, with what
you have in this sparse, arid land.
When I first began to see myself as a
writer, there were really no Native American writers. I've been writing for a long time. When I
{18} first became
conscious of this specific use of words in writing, I was a writer; and maybe even before that I
was a writer. By the time I was, say, twelve or thirteen, I had
started to make up songs--folk, country, and western songs--singing along with the radio, you
know, improvising, singing little things. I think by the time I was
that age I also had published my first Mother's Day poem . . .
I would romanticize myself as a
beginning writer, had an ambition. That's when I fashioned myself that I would have a kind of
grandiose stature, I don't
know, an Acoma Hemingway or something. [laughs] You know how impressionable young
people are. But there were really no models at all that were Native
American. The models that were there were the popular American ones, at least that we were
taught in school: Hemingway, Faulkner, the poets Whitman, Carl
Sandberg, Robert Frost. But Sandberg, obviously, and Whitman, who I felt spoke of a real
America. I think that socially conscious and socially committed
writers--Theodore Dreiser, realists like Hammond Garland, Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis--these
people were my models. Later on, in the 1960s, when I became
aware of Native American writers, and I looked for them, we were all more or less
contemporaries. N. Scott Momaday, the Kiowa novelist and poet, was a
student here at the University of New Mexico back in the late 1950s, early 1960s. He was a
model eventually, but then we're at the same time, contemporaries.
Jim Welch, Leslie Silko, actually we all came along about the same time. We were
interdependent models for each other. Inspirations, anyway.

DD: Why weren't we hearing those voices in the 1950s?

SO: Repression, mainly. Subtle repression and maybe
not-so-subtle repression through the schools, the public school policy being that indeed there are
no Native
Americans: "they're all a vanishing race, right?" "There are no Native Americans east of the
Mississippi." In fact, the Native Americans in the United States are
not real "Indians," they're Indians who aren't "Indians" anymore because, well, they don't ride the
painted ponies and live in teepees.
That was a method of repression: a
nonacceptance, nonrecognition, much less respect, nonsensitivity to Native American people and
culture and ways of
life. Obviously, within the communities, there were {19}
Indian people who kept telling the stories, who kept the ceremonies, who kept advising and
counsel to
the young, who kept the prayers. Even under the most severe of repressive activities by state law,
by church law or dictum, by federal law. And so this resulted in
a real dark age for Native American literature. There was no encouragement of Indian
expressiveness in writing; there was some in painting and sculpture.
Culture and self-government are
necessarily one thing. I think people would prefer to see culture as something separate and
self-government as another
thing that's a political entity. But the fact is that Indian people as self-sufficient peoples can only
be so when their interests and concerns with sovereignty are
regarded as a concern with culture as well. The fact of an integral culture means an integral
sovereignty. That's one of my concerns.

{20}

Simon Ortiz and the Lyricism of
Continuance

"For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land"

ROGER DUNSMORE

I started out to write this piece honoring Simon's work by taking a close look at his widely
anthologized, much loved, early poem, "My Father's Song." I wanted
to show how such a deeply personal short poem expressed that preeminent value,
continuance, which he invokes to focus native tradition and resistance beyond
mere survival. But along the way I got ambushed. I got ambushed by his father, by poems and
statements about his father and his father's influence on his work. I
was easy to ambush because in an eighteen-month time period a year and a half ago, I lost four
fathers: First, my wife's father, then, thirty-seven days later, my
father, eight months later, my mentor, the philosopher Henry Bugbee who brought me to
Montana, and six months later, Buster Yellow Kidney, the Blackfeet
elder and my friend. So Simon's statements about his father would not leave me alone. And the
continuance (a word I initially resisted due to its abstract quality)
that he invokes so eloquently probably has no more direct and forceful path than through the
parents and grandparents, in this case, through the father.
I want to look at his father as a
stone-worker, as a carver, as a singer, and at the influence of these on Simon as a writer. There is
an early poem, "A Story
of How a Wall Stands," in which his father explains the care, the mystery, and the mastery of
weaving stone into a wall for a graveyard at Aacqu. The picture we
are offered of this stone-working craft is created by his father's hands as he shows Simon the
motions these hands must make in the making of stone walls.{21}At Aacqu there is a
wallalmost 400 years
oldwhich supports
hundredsof tons of dirt and
bones--it's a graveyard built on
asteep incline--and it
lookslike it's about to fall
downthe incline but will not
fora long time.

My father, who works with
stone,
says, "That's just the part you
see,
the stones which seem to be
just packed in on the outside,"
and with his hands puts the stone and
mud
in place. "Underneath what looks like
loose stone,
there is stone woven together."
He ties one hand over the other,
fitting like the bones of his
hands
and fingers. "That's what is
holding it together."

"It is built that carefully,"
he says, "The mud mixed
to a certain texture," patiently
"with the fingers," worked
in the palm of his hand. So that
placed between the stones, they
hold
together for a long, long time.

He tells me these things,
the story of them worked
with his fingers, in the palm
of his hands, working the stone
and the mud until they become
the wall that stands a long, long time.
(Woven Stone 145)

{22} What's crucial about this particular wall is its
support of hundreds of tons of dirt and bones on a steep incline--for 400 years--its being the wall
for
containing the bones of the ancestors at Aacqu. The craft skills, the understanding, the qualities
of patience and carefulness, reside in his father's hand-bones as
their movements tell the story of the wall--stones woven together with mud. The
story of how a wall stands might also be the story of how a people stand, on the
steep incline of history. For any wall, especially one on an incline, is a balancing act, stones
standing amidst the forces of time and gravity and shifts in the ground
that might bring them down. The bones inside his father's hands know this story and these forces;
and they know the supreme value of a certain texture of mud
that must be mixed if the stones are to hold together, in time and space, and with the people, the
ancestors, the unborn. The title of Simon's volume collecting his
first four books of poetry, Woven Stone, is taken directly from this poem, and from
the sense that his own written work must contain the craft of weaving stones
and mud, hand bones and emotion, only with words, weaving tradition into the present, as others
have done in stone, cloth, mud, song for countless generations.
Simon makes this point clearly in his
biographical essay, "The Language We Know," in I Tell You Now:

Our family lived in a two-room home (built by my grandfather shortly after
he and my grandmother moved with their daughters from Old Acoma), which
my father added rooms to later. I remember my father's work at enlarging our home for our
growing family. He was a skilled stoneworker, like many other
men of an older Pueblo generation who worked with sandstone and mud motar [sic] to build their
homes and pueblos. It takes time, persistence, patience,
and the belief that the walls that come to stand will do so for a long, long time, perhaps even
forever. I like to think that by helping to mix mud and carry
stone for my father and other elders I managed to bring that influence into my consciousness as a
writer. (188-89)

The awareness that his
consciousness as a writer has been influenced by helping to mix mud and carry stone as a child
who takes {23} part in something
enduring in the life of the people, is at the heart of Simon's strength as a writer, is itself an act of
continuance. The act of writing must contain the act of
stone-working, just as the wall standing at Aacqu contains the bones of the ancestors. One thinks
of the well-known story of the Navajo students who were given
video cameras and asked to make their own documentary on the craft of weaving, how they
filmed the grasses, the plants, the sheep, the mesas and the clouds,
all that the weaving contained.
A further look at the influence of his
father's craft skills on his writing comes from Simon's essay "Song/Poetry and
Language--(Expression and
Perception)" in Symposium of the Whole:

My father carves, dancers usually. What he does is find the motion of Deer,
Buffalo, Eagle dancing in the form and substance of the wood [. . .] and his
sinewed hands touch the wood very carefully, searching and knowing.

His movements are very deliberate. He holds the Buffalo Dancer in the
piece of cottonwood poised on the edge of his knee, and he traces--almost
caresses--the motion of the Dancer's crook of the right elbow, the way it is held just below
midchest, and flicks a cut with the razor-edged carving knife.
And he does it again. He knows exactly where it is at that point in a Buffalo Dance Song, the
motion of elbow, arm, body and mind.

He clears his throat a bit and he sings, and the song comes from that motion
of his carving, his sitting, the sinews in his hands and face and the song itself.
His voice is full-toned and wealthy, all the variety and nuance of motion in the sounds and
phrases of the words are active in it; there is just a bit of tremble
from his thin chest. (399-400)

In this memory of his father
carving, Simon shows us the wholeness of the act--that wholeness involves knowledge of the
exact motion of the dancer's body
and mind, of the motion in the body of the piece of wood being held in his hands,
the motion of the Buffalo itself being sung/danced, in and by his hands, mind,
knife, even by his sit-{24}ting. It is no surprise, then, that
later on in the essay when Simon asks his father about a particular word he has used in speech or
song,

"What does it break down to? I mean, breaking it down to the syllables of
sound or phrases of sound, what do each of these parts mean?" And he has
looked at me with an exasperated--slightly pained--expression on his face, wondering what I
mean. And he tells me, "It doesn't break down into anything."
For him, the word does not break
down into any of the separate elements that I expect. The word he has said is complete. (400)

The father's act of language is
complete, just as the act of carving. It is this older sense of completeness in word, in song, or in
carving that Simon strives to
bring over into his writing, and this is not something learned at school.
Later in this same essay he elaborates
this sense of completeness in reference to song, to his father's singing, which we saw as a part of
his carving. But first
he tells a funny story about an older man named Page who went along with a hunting party as the
camp cook because his eyesight wasn't so good. At one point
Page thinks he is tracking a big deer when he is actually tracking a pig, which he goes ahead and
shoots. For the rest of his life his nephews ask him, "Uncle, tell
us about that time the pig was your deer." This story is to remind us, I suspect, that humor, too, is
as much a part of a hunt, or of a poetics, as anything else. He
goes on to say about song:

The song as expression is an opening from inside of yourself to outside and
outside of yourself to inside, but not in the sense that there are separate states
of yourself. Instead, it is a joining and an opening together. Song is the experience of that
opening [. . .]

When my father sings a song, he tries to instill a sense of awareness about
us. Although he may remark upon the progressive steps in a song, he does not
separate the steps or components of the song. The completeness of the song is the important
thing. {25} He makes me aware of these things because it
is
important, not only for the song itself but because it is coming from the core of who my father is,
and he is talking about how it is for him in relationship
with all things.

A song, a poem, becomes real in that manner. You learn its completeness. [.
. .] You learn a song in the way that you are supposed to learn a language, as
expression and as experience. (404-05)

And finally,

My father tells me, "This song is a hunting song: listen." He sings and I
listen. He may sing it again, and I hear it again. The feeling that I perceive is not
only contained in the words; there is something surrounding the song, and it includes us. It is the
relationship that we share with each other and with
everything else. And that's the feeling that makes the song real and meaningful and which makes
his singing and my listening more than just a teaching and
learning situation. (406-07)

When Simon was in Montana last April
for a lecture and reading I asked him, naively, why he used the word song in the title of the poem,
"My Father's
Song," since it was a story. As answer, he directed me to another short poem, "My Father
Singing," from late in his second book, A Good Journey. The poem
goes like this:

My father says,
"This song, I like it
for this one old man."
And my father moves
his shoulders, arms
and hands when he sings
the song.
My father says,
"When the old man
danced this song,
I liked it for him." (Woven
Stone 264)

{26}
Simon then said, "It isn't so much his
song as the way he moved his body when he talked, his body gestures," and he got up from where
we were sitting
outside, and moved his shoulders, arms and hands, moved his whole body in
gestures like his father's, and said, "It was like this that he moved when he spoke,
that's why I call it his song." His father's body danced its affection in him, the son, remembering
his father's life as motion and sound and emotion together, the
father's life continuing in these gestures of affection "for this one old man who used to like to
sing--and he danced like this" ("Song/
Poetry" 407). This connection between sound and motion, and emotion, between singing and
dancing and telling an affectionate story, is inherent in Ortiz's way
of receiving and giving experience. It lends to his poems an active silence that we feel in and
with the words.

My existence has been determined by language, [he says], not only the
spoken, but the unspoken, the language of speech and the language of motion. [. . .]
Memory, immediate and far away in the past, something in the sinew, blood, ageless cell.
Although I don't recall the exact moment I spoke or tried to
speak, I know the feeling of something tugging at the core of the mind, something unutterable
uttered into existence. (I Tell You Now, 187)

In these descriptions of his father
carving, singing, talking about language or explaining how a stone wall stands, Simon Ortiz has
suggested a Pueblo
Poetics--and reveals his father as a primary inspiration for his work as a writer. We see the
completeness of voice and self that is at the core of what Simon's
work continues, how such voice embodies the language of movement--the muscles and sinews,
the way the skin is wrinkled, even how one sits being a part of it,
the way a person is moved by the whole of the heritage he or she carries, as well as by their own
individual nature and experience. This language of motion that
he says has shaped him reminds us of a comment by Gary Witherspoon, in Language And
Art In the Navajo Universe, that the Navajos have over 350,000
conjugations of the verb "to go," so important a part of their world is the experience of
motion.{27}

In closing, I want to quote a note to my students that I scribbled on the inside cover of my almost
decade old copy of Woven Stone and dated December 11,
1995:

When I say Simon Ortiz is the most important poet writing in America
today, I mean (to borrow a phrase from Jason, a wilderness student who went on to
receive Rabbinical training)--I mean that Simon's poetry is thoroughly prayerful--full of prayers
and praising. And prayerful in a way that works today
because that isn't the result of any doctrine or creed or religion. It is an extension of thousands of
years of dry land farming culture in what is now called
the Southwest, and the pain of five centuries of colonialism. He knows the loss because he has
lived it--he also knows the life, the renewal, the fertile
power in everything, including us. And he just tells it, sings it, moves it in language so that all the
time it is praying, praising, respecting, alive, living.
Always, even in anger, Simon Ortiz has "gone for the rain."

I want to add a couple of points to
this statement. First, what makes this prayerful or sacramental quality so powerful in his work is
that it does not call
attention to itself as such, is left unstated and takes place almost casually in the course of writing
about seemingly ordinary events--like the standing of a stone
wall or moving mice out of a cornfield or bringing home a skinny dog. Second, these poems also
are an extension of the "ferociousness" with which the Acoma
Pueblo people have "held to their history, culture, language and land despite [. . .] the forces
surrounding them since [. . .] the advent of Euro-American
colonization" ("The Language We Know" 187). We must learn to listen for that "something that
surrounds the song"; to listen for that "something more than
memory or remembering that is at stake," we must catch the language of motion/emotion, and, if
we are to have a regard for "the sacredness of language," we
must, like old man Page, know when to let a pig become our deer.

{28}

WORKS CITED

Ortiz, Simon. Woven Stone. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1992. 145, 264.

------. "Song/Poetry and Language--(Expression and Perception)." Symposium of the
Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics. Ed. Jerome
Rothenberg and Dianne Rothenberg. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. 399-407.

At age four, my daughter colored motion. She swept circles around the page, starting with
yellow or blue; first this color, then that, adding in others as desired.
That year Simon Ortiz came "back East" to the school where I teach, to meet with my classes, to
give a reading, to enjoy a few days of spring in upstate New
York. We held a dinner at our house, and my daughter, not known for her enjoyment of large
gatherings, came into the room with a picture she had just finished
and handed it to Simon. Looking at its swirls of color and motion, he said, "A map of the
cosmos."
In his poem "Across the Prairie Hills"
from After and Before the Lightning, Simon recalls his f ather's words:

You make one
when you prepare to travel.
So you will always know
where you are, to where to
return.
Haitsee, a map of the universe.
(21-22)

In celebration of Simon's work, I look closely at the maps he creates in and through his
writing. They describe where the characters, the speakers, the readers
are; they suggest where those individuals might need to return (as for example in
the stories "Woman Singing" and "Crossing"). They are maps, not itineraries,
and yet they are filled with motion, with travel, with the energy that language is.
These maps arise from and belong to a
particular location; they {30} are of and from the margin.
While the word has often been associated with loss or
silence, Simon delineates a different landscape, one in which the margin is the open space or
opens the space between divisive borders. In the margins people
meet and talk and walk and plan. The place is vital, rife with the life of those who have
stepped--or been pushed--out of bounds.1
Such space is rarely easy or
comfortable. More often than not, it is dead difficult, filled with the voices of raging women and
wailing men. Where does a
person go when the mainstream washes them out? World trade centers collapse. Government
officials talk war--and mean it; all their imaginations yield. Words
spoken loudly in September echo brutally off the realities of the United States' divided history.
They march into March with no end in sight. My
now-eight-year-old daughter reads a Scholastic news article about the State of the
Union address and asks me why the president is declaring war yet again.
Retaliation. Vengeance. Words spoken by men who know nothing--or refuse to know nothing--of
Sand Creek or the Navajo Long Walk or the men at Acoma
mutilated because they sought back their way of life.
Where does a person go when borders
are closed, and they have become military and defensible, when the guns are trained on any one
who crosses? In the
American Southwest that is no new reality. Where does one go? Unbelievably and essentially
into the margin, the space between the borders. You head closer to
the sky as the Pueblo peoples did facing Spanish retaliation after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. You go
underground. You go, however you can, into print and try to
keep your good words there--out there in No Man's Land for those readers who know there is
power in language, power to describe and connect and unite
people in a shared vision.
That's where Simon has been, has
taken his readers for the last thirty years. His poetics are inseparable from an ethical commitment
that heightens
awareness into action. That action is fundamentally considerate. It brooks no man-made
hierarchy. When you listen, there is another reality, as Simon's readers
are given to know, and as those individuals held in life by Simon's words are given to know. In
the poem "Crazy Gook Indians," Emmett is laughed at by the
foreman {31} for his reaction in the mines but the reader
knows why Emmett responds as he does. Emmett's friend Danny explains,

in Section 30
one afternoon, we blasted
and my partner, Emmett,
thought
we were back in Vietnam,
back in the tunnels,
after the enemy, you know.
He picked up that drill like it was an
M-60
and tried to defend us against
the shift boss who'd been in the
Marines too. (Woven Stone 304)

While Danny holds Emmett in his arms,
comforting him mother to child, brother to brother, the boss laughs, enjoying the joke so much he
repeats it for the
superintendent. With Danny, the reader concludes, "I guess I should have let my partner / defend
us against that Marine" (Woven Stone 304).
In "Howbah Indians," Eagle, with his
Indian-operated, maybe even owned, gas station, is remembered for his "bright red and yellow
sign on the horizon,"
his statement to his community and to those beyond--"Welcome Howbah Indians." Despite his
brutal death, that fact does not become the center of his story.
Rather it is Eagle's voice that marks his continued existence in men's memory, those words on
that sign taking up "practically the whole horizon," overriding in
that moment the white man's control (Men on the Moon 23, 20).
"Shall"--that single, simple and potent
syllable--rises as the operative and transformative verb in this world of margin-centered
existence. It acts in good
company. It is song, words lifted by the sound of the human voice, a voice that is not alone but
one with many. The margins are not empty. They are moving
with life. You can hear it in "It Will Come; It Will Come":

With compassion.
With courage. {32}
With unity.
With understanding.
With love.
We shall endure.
We shall go on.
We shall have victory.
We shall know living.
We shall know living. (Woven
Stone 334)

Shall: the word speaks
continuance. It sustains meaning when individual lives are fragmented. It becomes their margin
of existence, and through its slow,
steady power, it supports the fundamental pulse of being. In "A Birthday Kid Poem," we listen as
"shall" becomes "be":

It shall end well.
It shall continue well
It shall be. (Woven
Stone 213)

That statement of future existence
in turn speaks for the most powerful response to the present. The poem ends with a phrase that
both describes and
commands: "Be enduring. / BE ENDURING" (Woven Stone 213).
Simon's words are maps for
endurance, maps for continuance. They take us into the margin, that ever-potent space between,
that space beyond. Here is a
place where time opens. In that opening is possibility: connections appear where there was once
emptiness; silence ceases and conversation begins. Those
margins are physical--"Bitter cold margins of wind flowing / from hill to hill." They are often
beautiful: "Snow rivers, sinuous / veins of vital organs" (After and
Before the Lightning 7). They hold memory that would otherwise be lost. They are
tenuous but tough, made tough by story. As Simon has told us again and
again, "Story helps." In these margins, speakers pool voices. That is our sinuous river. And so I
will end my words of thanks with words from Simon's poem
"Vital Margins."

The courage it takes is sometimes
marginal.
yet our lives are durable, as tough
{33}
as sinewy wind, up then down, love
and hope
more vital than anything else.
Story helps. We live the margins
we've seen. (After and Before the Lightning 7-8)

NOTES

1. The words I write here began in
conversation. On an April day, after class, Simon and I were talking about where Native
literature is now, who teaches
it, why, who reads, what keeps courses in contemporary Native American literature from
becoming just another example of that "temporary tourism of the soul,"
to use Wendy Rose's phrase. That day we talked about margins, the in-between spaces, about
Gloria Anzaldúa's words on borderlands and the promise held by
El Mundo Zurdo. That conversation is only part of a larger one, continuing to this day.

WORKS
CITED

Ortiz, Simon J. After and Before the Lightning. Tucson: U of Arizona P,
1994.

------. Men the Moon. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1999.

------. Woven Stone. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1992.

{34}

"The story goes its own way"

Ortiz, Nationalism, and the Oral Poetics of Power

DAVID L. MOORE

In the four "Lightning" poems that frame Simon Ortiz's 1994 collection After and
Before the Lightning, he charts the internal agonies of the winter of history. By
the finale, an emergence with all the labor pains of spring, there is not only survival, but an
affirmation of power. And power, for Ortiz, pulses in the land.

We do finally know why we don't
turn
from danger or beauty or sadness or
joy.
How completely we feel the
tremoring
and shuddering pulse of the land
now
as we welcome the
rain-heart-lightning
into our trembling yearning selves.
(133-134)

Those feelings, that yearning, the
give and take of that power of the land, remain a constant affirmation throughout his work. In an
earlier 1980 collection,
Fight Back, he writes,

This land yearns
for us.
The people yearn
for the land.
Loss and separation
are hard to bear. (62)

His work is dedicated not only to
bearing that loss and separation, but somehow to reversing it, reuniting the people, and as he
says, "not {35} just Indian
people," with the land (Fight Back 73). He maps that process in the historical and
political spheres and increasingly in the inner territories of the mind and heart
as well. Ortiz is generous in showing his readers how to overcome fear of that "danger or beauty
or sadness or joy," and even how we "finally know why we
don't turn" from that danger. He writes,

Choosing words is a waste of time. Let the words choose you, let them
choose their own place, time, identity, meaning. [. . .] They have their own power,
their own magic, wonder, brilliance. Where and how they fit, that has nothing to do with us. The
only thing we can do is recognize, admit, and accept that.
Let words choose us. Let language empower us, give us beauty and awe. We cannot do anything
about it. When we think we can, when we choose words,
it is a waste of time. (After and Before the Lightning 51)

His assertion of the "power [. . .]
magic, wonder, and brilliance" in words celebrates the multiplicities of language and human
discourse as the creator of our
expressions of experience and ourselves. This view is in direct contrast with romantic literary
nostalgia over the so-called "death of the author." The life or death
of the author is not the core issue as long as the stories continue. Instead of some "prison of
language," he sees a celebratory source of life in language, with the
author dancing along.
If what makes a poet is openness to
that power in language, one of the particularly magnetic qualities in his writing is the fearless
way that Ortiz maintains
such openness in the midst of a devastating history. This warrior courage is based on love of land
and community and on faith in life itself. Faith is always elusive
and can be misread as optimism. In a remarkable, reciprocal logic of encouragement, we can read
this faith in simply "life and its continuance" through this
passage from Fight Back:

We must have passionate concern for what is at stake. We must understand
the experience of the oppressed, especially the ra-{36}cial and ethnic
minorities, of this nation, by this nation and the economic interests, because only when we truly
understand and accept the responsibilities of that
understanding will we be able to make the necessary decisions for change. Only then will we
truly understand what it is to love the land and people and to
have compassion. Only when we are not afraid to fight against the destroyers, thieves, liars,
exploiters who profit handsomely off the land and people will
we know what love and compassion are. Only when the people of this nation, not just Indian
people, fight for what is just and good for all life, will we
know life and its continuance. And when we fight, and fight back those who are bent on
destruction of land and people, we will win. We will win. (73)

Those fighting words are filled
with the courage of passionate certitude. In the heart of the storm of colonialism, which he
names--"This America / has been
a burden / of steel and mad / death . . ."--his aesthetic of openness merges with the ethics of
power in native nationalism and authenticity (From Sand Creek 9).
"[T]he indigenous peoples of the Americas have taken the languages of the colonialists and used
them for their own purposes" ("Towards a National Indian
Literature" 10). This ability to transform oppressive discourses into "their own purposes" derives
from a returning and returning affirmation of dynamic cultural
authenticity. "It is by the affirmation of knowledge of source and place and spiritual return that
resistance is realized" ("Towards a National Indian Literature"
11). In Ortiz's definition, this is a dynamic, not static, authenticity which moves through that very
act of resistance by which the people use colonial languages
"for their own purposes." Inside that historical burden of America, he thus can go on to
write,

but, look now,
there are flowers
and new grass
and a spring wind
rising
from Sand Creek. (From Sand
Creek 9)

{37}
But how does this work? On the one
hand, Ortiz writes, "Let the words choose you"; and on the other, he affirms that those words
must be used by native
artists "for their own purposes." How can the words "choose" you when you "use" them for
particular purposes? His negotiations of this complex dynamic run
parallel to ancient Western questions of free will and predestination, to ancient Eastern mystical
tensions between visualization and acceptance, to postmodern
tensions between individual agency and social construction, to critical linguistic tensions
between personal expression and social language. Ortiz has addressed
many of these binary questions in his work. His essays such as, "Song/Poetry and
Language--Expression and Perception" and "Towards a National Indian
Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism," written more than twenty years ago, contribute
to these ancient discussions in many ways that are beyond the
scope of this paper. Suffice it to say that he provides not only the conceptual spark but also the
practical example of how to make the leap that transcends or
deconstructs these binaries basically of spirit and matter. Ortiz shows us how the way out of or
through a paradox--out of a binary lock such as openness to
language versus reinvention of language--is the courage of dynamic focused energy, a leap of
faith across or around the abyss of that divide. For now, we can
watch that leap of faith as we discuss how these two tendencies in his work, to "let the words
choose you" and to take "the language[s] of the colonialists and
[use] them for their own purposes" as a native nationalist.
Are these two tendencies, with their
various aesthetic and ethical dimensions, a contradiction or a mystification? Is he being co added
to the other tough
questions about how Indian voices reinvent their stories in the enemy's language. Through Ortiz's
oral aesthetic of resistive and regenerative cultural authenticity,
we find a single root in that certainty which knows that "The story goes its own way"
(After and Before the Lightning 20). In his description of the power of the
oral tradition, there is little room for powerlessness. For instance, this affirmation of an oral
aesthetics of power is from his introduction to his edited volume,
Earth Power Coming:{38}

There have always been the songs, the prayers, the stories. There have
always been the voices. There have always been the people. There have always been
those words which evoked meaning and the meaning's magical wonder. There has always been
the spirit which inspired the desire for life to go on. And it
has been through the words of the songs, the prayers, the stories that the people have found a way
to continue, for life to go on.
It is the very experience of life that
engenders life. It is the act of perception that insures knowledge. For Indian people, it has been
the evolvement of
a system of life which insists on one's full awareness of his relationship to all life. Through words
derived from one's thoughts, beliefs, acts, experiences, it
is possible to share this awareness with all mankind. (vii)

Because of this root of certitude in
his aesthetic, and its ethics, he can give himself, his writing, and even history over to an
affirmation. For example, in a
remarkable moment in After and Before the Lightning, Ortiz inserts an internal,
contemplative voice into a communal story:

"In those days, people would go on top of Horace Mesa to gather
piñon nuts. Once in October, they went for two days. On the second day it started to
snow. It snowed all afternoon and into the night. [. . .]" No, it's not that way. The story goes its
own way. In my mind the words go their way, following
the basic story plus the imagination and memory, plus the way I have experienced things. It is
how the story goes, my mother's and father's words, their
experiences in my mind, and my mind's own knowledge.
Imagination is a harking back to the
source but it is also more than source.
[ . . . ]
Snow that October, the language of
experience, sensation, history, imagination are all in the story and how it carries forth. Story has
its own life, its
very own, and we are the voice carried with it. (After and Before the Lightning
20){39}
By his explanation such letting go so
that the story may go "its own way" is only a loss of illusion. Control gives way to that reciprocal
certitude. We
become empowered as we let ourselves be "the voice carried with" the story, "as we welcome the
rain-heart-lightning / into our trembling yearning selves."
This empowerment becomes a writer's balanced embrace of the power of craft and the power of
language, and that embrace functions on fundamental faith
in those powers.
Throughout his work Ortiz marks
many expressions of this reciprocal certitude in references to "Existence" or "continuance" or to
"the creative
forces of life" (Fight Back 1). The affirmation often remains submerged as the a
priori, the foundational dynamic of his language and perception. He rarely
lands directly on faith in these forces as its own focus, perhaps because of a difference between
optimism and faith: where optimism is vague and passive
and faith is specific and active, like the focused energy of reciprocal certitude which turns in
Ortiz's words. His prose can be explicit about that cycle, "my
own writing comes from a similar dynamic of reciprocity shared by the land, water, and human
culture" (Speaking for the Generations xv). Often this
dynamic affirmation of faith focuses the process that drives his politics. For instance, he writes,
"There is a revolution going on; it is very spiritual and its
manifestation is economic, political, and social. Look to the horizon and listen" (From
Sand Creek 54). By mapping those manifestations of spirit, his
works direct the active reader to the full spectrum of grim history both as it is written and as he
would rewrite it to revise a future.
As Robin Riley Fast suggests,
"Having given his testimony, Ortiz can finally rely only on hope, but the terms in which he
imagines hope, in the
context of this history, must be limited unless his witness compels his listeners to faith and
action" (59). In that momentum of action, Ortiz gives many
phrases to this ineffable "Existence." Again in dynamic relation, he invokes "the creative ability
of Indian people to gather in many forms of the
socio-political-colonizing force which beset them and to make those forms meaningful in their
own terms" ("Towards a National Indian Literature" 8).
That "creative ability of Indian people" is linked in turn to the center of "Existence," a term
{40} which he frequently capitalizes. In his introduction
to
Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, Ortiz writes,

Acoma Pueblo people believe they came into Existence as a human culture
and community at Shipapu, which they know is a sacred mythic place of origin.
Shipapu and a belief in Shipapu, therefore and thereafter, is the mythic source of their Existence.
Coming into Existence from a source like Shipapu is
indisputably an assertion of their direct relationship with the creative spirit-force-dynamic of the
earth. (xiii-xiv)

His connections to this
"spirit-force-dynamic of the earth" take many forms of expression, which we might approach
through Ortiz's own general categories
of manifestation--economic, political, and social--and he maps those categories onto a ground
which we might call ecological. Thus there emerge in his writing
four foci of his "spirit-energy-dynamic of the earth": first the ecological "for the sake of the
land"; second the social "for the sake of the people"; third the
political, how "Warriors will keep alive in the blood;" and fourth the economic, how he addresses
"this heart which is our America" (From Sand Creek 33). Of
course any one of these bears the weight of any of the other categories, as the economic is
ecological, the political is social, and so forth. What is key here is his
originary faith in the "spirit-energy-dynamic" which can envision active human choice in each of
these realms.
For the sake of time, I would like to
discuss briefly only the last two of these areas in conclusion, and leave "for the sake of the land"
and "for the sake of
the people" to our other speakers who, I am sure, will treat them abundantly. I am intrigued by
the warrior anger which Ortiz wields with such skill, a warrior
ethos not "frightened by emotion, / the sheer joy of being men, / of being children" (From
Sand Creek 59). There is a fascinating link from that warrior ethic in
his work to the particular ways that his redefinitions of "America" offer the enemies of that
warrior a vision of compassion. The warrior who is open to anger is
also open to compassion. Thus, speaking of the settlers, he writes,{41}
They should have eaten
whole buffalo.
They should have,
like the People wanted for them.
(From Sand Creek 51)

If they had taken more than just the tongues and hides, if the hunters had had compassion for
the buffalo, the invaders might even have discovered how
"Warriors could have passed / into their young blood" (From Sand Creek 35). By
openness to feelings, they would be open to the warrior spirit that survives.
Ortiz is generous in battle.
I think this generosity rises up because
his work is courageous enough to imagine balance in a crazy world, in a crazy psyche. In a
passage on shell-shocked
warriors in the Ft. Lyons veterans hospital, he writes, "There is an honest and healthy anger
which will raze these walls, and it is the rising of our blood and
breath which will free our muscles, minds, spirits" (From Sand Creek 84). Having
also written, "I am so mad / with love for these derelicts," he personalizes that
proclamation about anger in the lines that conclude the accompanying poem:

I could only cry,
mangled
like his anger,
amazed
and dismayed. (From Sand
Creek 85)

When that anger cannot find an
outlet, it injures the self. "Repression," he writes, "works like a shadow, clouding
memory and sometimes even to blind, and
when it is on a national scale, it is just not good" (From Sand Creek 14). But as we
saw in Fight Back, the courage to resist is linked to the passion for life, and
that passion is linked to compassion even for disappointed settlers. "Even the farmer has become
a loser," he writes (From Sand Creek 30). That compassion is
aimed even toward deluded soldiers at Sand Creek, {42}
[. . .] and breathing
self-righteously they deemed
themselves blessed and pure
so that not even breath
became life--
life strangled
in their throats. (From Sand
Creek 75)

Yet that warrior spirit survives
even the assault of self-righteous massacres, enough to convey a tone of tenderness that is the
only way to catch the
attention of despair:

A faith in the warrior spirit is a
faith in life, in corn, as the prose statement accompanying this poem declares: "In this
hemisphere, corn is ancient and young;
it is the seed, food, and symbol of a constantly developing and revolutionary people"
(From Sand Creek 32). The energy of revolution is the biological cycle of
sunlight in corn as food for human bodies.
In the next category where his
pragmatic faith in "the spirit-force-dynamic of the earth" addresses "this heart which is our
America," his alternate vision of
history evokes a cross-cultural nation where whites unlearn Puritanism and relearn from Indians
that death is not {43} sin, that suffering is not evil, that
they did
not have to mask their fear and guilt in a myth of Manifest Destiny, that "We do finally know
why we don't turn / from danger or beauty or sadness or joy." In
From Sand Creek he writes, "Pain and death did not have to be propagated as
darkness and wrong and coldness; they could have listened and listened and
learned to sing in Arapaho" (34). Such a fantasy does not ring hollow, because Ortiz hooks that
alternate history onto internal, psychological losses that are real.
He even counsels the white warriors:

They should have seen
the thieves stealing
their most precious treasure:
their compassion, their anger.
(From Sand Creek 59)

Again, his faith in that
spirit-force-dynamic categorizes compassion and anger together as a warrior energy. Ortiz not
only suggests how a white military
was out of touch with its compassion because it was out of touch with the roots of its anger, he
speaks to the white culture in a voice like a matter-of-fact
mother earth, suggesting what could have been history:

There was no paradise,
but it would have gently and
willingly
and longingly given them food and
air
and substance for every
comfort.
If they had only acknowledged
Even their smallest conceit.
(From Sand Creek 79)

Presumably there is still a future
in that yearning and longing of the land for the people. Ortiz even articulates for them their
arrogance and their acquisitive
assumptions: "There is probably no way to verify if people become self-righteous and arrogant
because they are dissatisfied or failures, but they certainly do"
(From Sand Creek 76). Through his own clarity about that spirit-energy-dynamic,
Ortiz is able to diagnose the problem:{44}
And onward,
westward
they marched,
sweeping aside the potential
of dreams which could have
been
generous and magnificent
and genius for them.

It is
no wonder
they deny regret
for the slaughter
of their future.
Denying eternity, it is no
wonder
they became so selflessly
righteous. (From Sand
Creek 77)

In a collection which takes the
Sand Creek Massacre as its central metaphor, it is a remarkable twist for Ortiz to point to the
"slaughter / of their future,"
referring to the destruction of America's own compassionate heart in the violent extremes of that
self-righteous mentality. And in that same context, we can see
further his point that "Denying eternity" is the consequence of denying humanity in America's
"others" by that tragic militarism which slaughtered and mutilated
Black Kettle's peaceful camp.From Sand Creek begins
not only with America as "a burden / of steel and mad / death," but astonishingly frames the
intimate, angry, celebratory poems
with this affirmation at the end:

That dream
shall have a name
after all,
and it will not be vengeful
but wealthy with love
and compassion
and knowledge. {45}
And it will rise
in this heart
which is our America. (95)

In the first poem of From
Sand Creek, which begins "Grief / memorizes this grass" of Ft. Lyons, Colorado, the
staging ground for the 1864 massacre, Ortiz
provokes his readers to the act of believing in that primary energy which survives such grief. In
this instance, he calls that spirit-force-dynamic "raw courage":

Raw
courage,
believe it,
red-eyed and urgent,
stalking Denver.
Like stone,
like steel,
the hone and sheer gone,
just the brute
and perceptive angle left.

Like courage,
believe it,

left still;
the words from then
talk like that.
Believe it. (11)

He can deliver this imperative to
believe in the timelessness of words spoken with raw courage because that is what he does. Here
again Ortiz gives us not
only the urgency but the example of how to see and what to do with the history of our America,
which he loves as "something precious in the memory in blood
and cells which insists on story, poetry, song, life, life" (From Sand Creek 92). By
faith in that life, he writes, "Women and men may be broken and scattered, but
{46} they remember and think about the reasons why.
They answer their own questions and always the truth and love will make them decide"
(From Sand Creek
56). His readers and his nation, Acoma and America, owe him real thanks on these
questions.

The smoke of student riots still lingered in the air the fall I arrived at the University of New
Mexico with my three-year-old son to begin my studies in pre-med
and dance in the early seventies. The Kiva Club, (the Indian student club), was my community,
my center of gravity. We were dedicated to defining, securing,
defending and protecting Native rights. We didn't just talk; we acted. After classes and meetings
we'd often gather later to continue discussions, or to party. We
were a pivotal generation and urgently understood the need for cultural regeneration, political
and social renovation; we did everything passionately, hard.

One night that first fall at UNM, I met Simon Ortiz. It was at a gathering of native students
and activists. Simon started the conversation. He was working for the
National Indian Youth Council with Gerald Wilkinson up on Central Avenue, and had been
sleeping on the floor of the offices. I don't know what I said or if I
said much of anything at all beyond my tribal affiliation and school major. I was shy,
self-contained. He was a poet, he said. What do you say to a poet? Sure I
knew about Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the Beats, but there was no
such thing in our circle, though we did respect the power of
words. I'd admired eloquent native speeching at press conferences and in circles of meaning and
consequence, from my own quiet distance. And many students at
Indian school wrote poetry. Mostly, I'd always imagined poets as pale men (and the rare {48} spinster) declaiming in long aristocratic coats, haling from
wet,
cold lands. I had never met an Indian person before who introduced himself as "a poet."
Simon Ortiz invited me to a reading
he was going to do the next morning over live radio. I don't think I went the next morning to the
radio show, but
eventually we became a couple. He obsessively wrote poems and journals, labored hours at his
typewriter at the kitchen table or on some other improvised desk.
He had meetings, associations, even at times, an entourage of followers. I painted. He was the
one with words. I was wordlessness. I had always preferred the
silence and space of painting and drawing, after taking care of a child, then children. As I
watched Simon work I had to admit that I was amazed at the creation
of a poem, how a kernel of meaning and sound condensed to one page could stagger the world
with meaning. There was Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Gabrielle
Minstral, and I held their poems in my hands. And not just their words, but in these words lived
souls, lands, and peoples. What blew me open next was the
realization that poetry lived within our native lands, our communities. And that poetry could be
about the everyday of washing dishes, sunrise, crows carrying on,
and that crickets in the corner of the room making a huge racket as well could be honoring songs
for those we loved, for those who were working with us for
justice. Poetry became a refuge in those times of gathering together, standing up, and
reconfiguring. Poetry was Simon's gift to me, and it was here that my
poetry began.

3
AM1

in the Albuquerque airport
trying to find a flight
to Old Oraibi, Third Mesa
TWA
is the only desk open
bright lights outline New York
Chicago
and the attendant doesn't know
that Third Mesa {49}
is a part of the center
of the world
and who are we
just two indians
at three in the morning
trying to find a way back

and then I remembered
that time Simon
took a Yellow Cab
out to Acoma from
Albuquerque
a twenty five dollar ride
to the center of himself

3 AM is not too late
to find the way back

Are You Still
There?

there are sixty-five miles
of telephone wire
between acoma
and albuquerque
i dial the number
and listen for the sound
of his low voice
on the other side
hello
is a gentle motion of a western
wind
cradling tiny purple flowers
that grow near the road
towards laguna
i smell them
as i near the rio puerco bridge
my voice stumbles
returning over sandstone
as it passes the canoncito exit {50}
i have missed you he says
the rhythm circles the curve
of mesita cliffs
to meet me
but my voice is caught
shredded on a barbed wire fence
at the side of the road
and flutters soundless
in the wind

NOTE

1. The following poems appear in
Joy Harjo, How We Became Human (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), and were
originally published in What Moon
Drove Me To This? (Berkeley: I.Reed Books, 1979).

{51}

The Stories He Lives By

EVELINA ZUNI LUCERO

Summer 1978. I was a young journalist, in love with words, thriving on deadlines and
adrenaline rushes, disbelieving that I actually got paid to meet and
interview Indian leaders and newsmakers, movers and shakers, like poet Simon Ortiz. Simon and
I sat on the grass, under the thick shade of cottonwood trees
that dominated the then-existing campus of the Albuquerque Indian School. The All Indian
Pueblo Council was in the process of taking over the school from
BIA control. The aging buildings were being condemned one by one, and AIPC was looking into
how they could provide a better education for Pueblo youth. It
was a fitting place for an interview with this poet, what with the political implications in a
boarding school setting, and Simon's confrontation of issues facing
America and Native America in his writing.
I was only vaguely aware of his
writing, though by this point he already had four books to his name. His book Howbah
Indians had just been published, his
reputation growing. It was an amazing discovery for me that Indians could be authors. There had
been none as I grew up, no one I recognized in all the books I
had read. I listened hard as Simon spoke, not only because that comes with journalistic training,
but because his words resonated within me: "As Indian persons,
each of us has different roles and tasks, and I decided I would write to carry out the responsibility
of teaching Indian and non-Indian people" (Zuni).
Even if it had only started as an
adolescent dream, I still harbored the thought in the back of my mind that someday I could write
a book. And here before
me was an Indian author, a Pueblo no less, who wrote of people and places with
which I was familiar, who showed in {52} his poems and
stories that our lives
were as important and worthy as any. Like coyote, he had been all over the country, working all
kinds of jobs, meeting all kinds of people, and then writing about
those experiences. His hands gestured as he spoke passionately about writing, about themes in
his work, about responsibilities, about the value of language.
The '60s were a defining moment for
Simon:

[He told me,] I think a lot of us went through quite a change. We came to a
point in time where we had to make a decision either to keep on being treated
as a stereotype image of the quiet Indian or to speak out and to demand respect. Not just quietly
ask, but to act, to confront the non-Indian power
structure. I think this happened within the communities, Indian and non-Indian, and within
ourselves. We gained a more firm idea of ourselves, what our
human capabilities were, and could become.
Most of my writing is part of a story
of Indian people, life, land, America. Most Indian people grow up with the thought of being
useful for the sake
of the land, the people. This kind of philosophy is really what I want to make my writing be.
(Zuni)

It amazed me that an author was down to earth, a "regular" guy not caught up in arrogance,
but was interested in community and in speaking to community.
Looking back, I see so clearly that he, who had also been without Indian models, was paving the
way for all the native writers who followed, including me.
Eight years later I was in the graduate
program at UNM in the creative writing program, studying Native American literature, not
knowing then the Native
American Renaissance was beginning to roll, with Simon as one of the major writers at its
forefront. Since then I have become well familiar with Simon's work
and have heard him read and speak many times and have had many conversations with him.
Returning to this interview twenty-six years later, I am struck with
how Simon's message has remained constant over the years as only a message that comes with
conviction can. What he said then is what he always has said and
is what literary scholars have written about as a common theme of resistance in his
work and in native lit-{53}erature in general: "Indian
people are really
energetic and enthused about how we can work, not only with organizations just on specific
levels, but throughout all things. There's a lot of inspiration by
looking at the long history of resistance. If our ancestors hadn't fought, we wouldn't be here"
(Zuni).
He told me in 1978 that in his writing,
he strives for an in-depth insight into people, not just their personalities, but also the events
which surround people
and in which they grow, sometimes even destructively: "People's lives aren't always successful. I
have always tried to find, even in defeat, inspiration for others"
(Zuni). I think it is this quality in his writing of providing hope and inspiration that resounds with
readers.
He is an important writer, well
regarded, revered even, by some. He has contributed much to native literature with his essays,
poetry, and short stories,
always with that seeming simplicity that overlays complexity. His native language, the stories of
his people, his traditional upbringing permeate his thought, his
writing, his voice, his presence. He speaks forth the Indian experience in a way people, white and
Indian, urban and reservation, recognize and embrace. Always
he opens with a greeting in the Acoma language. His voice is resonant. He speaks slowly. His
words are deceptively simple but hit with a twang to the heart like
an arrow to the bull's eye. He writes out of a tender compassion for the harsh political and social
realities of native life. He writes and speaks from his heart.
In addition to his writing, his
significant contribution to native literatures is his constant support of emerging writers and
support of Native American studies
at the University of New Mexico and the Institute of American Indian Arts. I admire this
community consciousness. No matter where he is, he always comes
home to reconnect, to contribute, to participate. His writing, his life, truly is for the land, the
community, the next generation.

"It was that Indian [. . .]"(3). The first time I heard Simon Ortiz read this line from his poem
with the same title was in the 1970s at the University of New
Mexico. He was reading from his recent work, Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For
the Sake of the Land. These poems spoke powerfully of the uranium
mining that was taking place on Laguna land in New Mexico. Simon's poetry was a reflection of
not only his experience as a former mine worker, but of the
Southwestern native people's experience in the mining industry.
"It was that Indian. [. . .]" A little
revolution exploded in my mind. It's been twenty-four years since he wrote this line, but it
continues to stick with me.
Few native writers were getting their work published in those days. At this poetry reading, Simon
named places I knew and people who worked for the mines
near Laguna and Grants, New Mexico. With each poem he read, I became more immersed in his
words. As we used to say in the 70s, "he blew me away" with
his words.
I grew up on the Diné
reservation in New Mexico and Arizona in a remote place and mostly disconnected from the
outside world. At the elementary Day
School I learned to read from the Dick and Jane reading series. When we got to see television
once a week, it reflected a white America: Our Miss Brooks, The
Real McCoys,The Three Stooges,The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Here was one of the first native writers speaking of border towns, capitalism, exploitation,
environmental pollution, and racism. Though they were his words, he spoke powerfully for those
of us who were silent. Simon's reading made us feel the power
of language, the power of speaking for The People and for the land.{55}
Further on he read, "and never mind
also / that the city had a jail full of Indians" (Fight Back 3). Simon voiced a silent
truth that we Indians had been living
under for nearly five hundred years of colonialism. No one was writing of border towns, those
little havens of racism and exploitation hubs that simmered near
the reservations in those days, except for Simon. My childhood memories are still clouded by the
times when my family parked in the JCPenney's parking lot and
saw Indian men and women shout greetings to their family below from behind the shadowy
windows of the upper floor of the Gallup city jail. His words continue
to explode in my mind as they do today when I'm at his readings or reading his work. My earliest
writing, stirred with Simon's activism, influenced my work as I
tentatively put words on paper. His work as an activist poet has helped raise our social and
political consciousness and, I believe, influenced the present
generation of native poets and writers. Simon, as informal mentor, has generously given his time
and editorial skills to beginning native writers. I am especially
grateful for his editorial help on my manuscript, No Parole Today. With Simon's
early encouragement and support I published some of my earliest work as a
fledgling poet. It was during this time I sorely needed a mentor to give me the kind of
encouragement that he provided.
"We have been told many things, / but
we know this to be true: / the land and the people," Simon wrote from the same work
(Fight Back 36). In each new
book Simon has taken us on his journeys, sometimes as trickster Coyote, sometimes as father, as
husband, as lover, as son, as urban derelict, as teacher in his
comments on the Indian in America, and on America. He once said, "My education comes from
experiencing all of America." While some of his revelations are
hard to take, he avoids descending into cynicism and bitterness. Instead he reaches for hope, for
the continued struggle to survive. His activist poetry converges
with the spiritual values of his Aacqu/Acoma upbringing and his compassion. Simon, like Ella
Deloria, Vine Deloria, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and Leslie Marmon
Silko, speaks from The People's consciousness for the sake of the land and The People. These
word warriors' past and present have helped defend the sovereign
status of native nations and the struggles of na-{56}tive
peoples on their terms. Simon is also one of the few native writers who use the Acoma language
in his work.
Simon defined colonialism in his
work when no one else spoke of it. Before there was such a thing as the Native American literary
renaissance, Simon
affirmed the spirit and values of The People when many of us were struggling with the residual
effects of boarding schools. Simon's body of work consistently
responds with the deeply rooted values and beliefs of indigenous peoples toward the earth,
toward each other, and for continuance as native peoples. Perhaps for
this reason his work has been often glossed over by critics.
While it would be easy to simply slot
Simon into Native American poet or Acoma poet, his work speaks of issues that confront our
national consciousness,
issues such as the U.S. military presence in the Middle East and Iraq. Closer to home, he has
written of American genocide in From Sand Creek and U.S. policies
that impact native lands and native peoples that bear parallels to the U.S. presence in the Middle
East. At his readings he exhorts us to challenge national issues
that face us as American citizens and, most particularly, as tribal nations.
Simon Ortiz's body of work spans
across four decades. He gives us a rich and enduring legacy of poetry, stories, including
children's stories, essays, and
film work. He is a nationally and internationally recognized poet. Locally he has been acclaimed
many times over and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement by
the Word Craft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. His recognition as one of America's
foremost poets and writers is long overdue. He once said that to
demystify language is to use language as clearly and succinctly as possible. For that I say,
ahé'hee', thank you for bringing forth our history and our stories for
survival, for continuance.

WORKS
CITED

Ortiz, Simon J. Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the
Land. Albuquerque: Institute for Native American Development--Native American
Studies, U of New Mexico, 1980.

In 2000 I invited Simon Ortiz and Teresa Leal, co-chair of the Southwest Network for
Environmental and Economic Justice, to the North American Conference
on Environment and Community in Reno, Nevada. I had asked Simon to participate, with Teresa,
on a roundtable that would focus on how artists, activists,
scholars, and teachers can work together to achieve the goals of the environmental justice
movement, which advocates for the right of all people to benefit
equally from a safe and clean environment. Waiting for a delayed flight, Simon, Teresa, and I
found ourselves in the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, drinking coffee
and eating bagels. Simon and Teresa had never met before and they were clearly enjoying the
opportunity to talk about who they knew in common, what places
they had both visited, and what civil rights and environmental actions they had each participated
in.
I remember feeling privileged to be
sitting with these two. Each had contributed so much, to use Simon's words, "for the sake of the
land and all people."
Teresa (Opata/Mayo) had been on the front lines, fighting against the contamination of workers
and their environments since her days working in the fields with
Cesar Chavez in the 1960s. Simon had been writing about his own people, the Acoma, and other
Native American peoples since the 1960s, drawing connections
between such events as the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and modern day corporate colonization of
American Indian labor and resources and the consequent social
breakdown in native communities and toxic degradation of the surrounding environment. "When
I write," {58} he would say at the roundtable discussion
that
took place the next day, "I write as an Indian, or native person, concerned with his environmental
circumstances and what we have to do to fight for a good kind
of life" (Adamson 16).
"Fighting for a good kind of life" is
one of the most powerful themes running through Simon's writings and certainly one of the most
urgent goals of the
environmental justice movement. In the preamble to the seventeen "Principles of Environmental
Justice" created at the 1991 First National People of Color
Summit in Washington, D.C., delegates declared their right to "secure our political, economic,
and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of
colonization and oppression resulting in the poisoning of our communities and land and the
genocide of our peoples" (qtd. in Di Chiro 307). In interviews and
readings throughout the 1990s, Simon was talking about the right of indigenous peoples to fight
for their own liberation in terms very similar to those in the
preamble. In Winged Words, he told interviewer Laura Coltelli,

[this] process of colonization, that is, usurping the indigenous power of the
people, taking their land and resources and language and heritage away--that
has to be struggled against. [. . .] You have to fight it, to keep what you have, what you are,
because they are trying to steal your soul, your spirit, as well
as your land. (111)

The fight against colonization, he
said when I first met him during the 1992 "Poetics and Politics: Reading by Native American
Writers Series" in Tucson,
Arizona, has to begin with "responsibility" and "advocacy." "Native American writers," he
explained, "have to be responsible to their source, it's an advocacy
position in a way, to be able to continue as who we are, to sustain ourselves and to be nourished
by our cultural source, then you have to be an advocate, but an
advocate that is responsible" ("Poetics and Politics").
Simon's observation that there is a
fine line to walk in advocacy and that advocacy must begin with a "responsibility to the source,"
resonates strongly with
many of the discussions I have had with {59} Teresa Leal
over the past several years. Just the other day, we were speaking of Simon, reminiscing about our
pleasant conversation with him at Sky Harbor, and thinking about the challenges of being a
person willing to speak first. She told me,

It is hard, Joni, to be the first one to speak. Especially if you are Indian.
Indians must always be aware of how much of their culture has been lost and how
careful they must be not to speak a word that would contribute to more loss. There are often
consequences for speaking, for being the first. It is hard to be
the first to speak on any issue that runs contrary to the opinions of the dominant culture, but it is
hard, too, to be the first to speak in American Indian
communities. Simon is a strong voice, a strong writer who has spoken first in his poetry and
prose on many issues, including the consequences of
colonization and the reasons why we must see people at the center of our concern for the
environment.

Teresa's words were a tribute to
Simon, who has remained true to his Acoma source, while at the same time daring to speak first
on important issues and
standing as a strong advocate for greater social and environmental responsibility. In poems such
as "That's the Place the Indians Talk About," Ortiz makes clear
the explicit connection between speaking and advocating for justice. In the poem, an old Paiute
man listens to a sacred hot springs through a fence which has
been put up by the naval personnel who have built a base around the springs and who now use
this base to test weapons of destruction. The Paiute man says,
"We don't like to talk to the fence and the Navy / but for a while we will and pretty soon / we will
talk to the hot springs power again" (Fight Back 34). The old
man listens to the "stones down there moving around each other" and hears them "talking"; this
"moving power" is "the moving power of the voice, / the moving
power of the earth, / the moving power of the People" (Fight Back 33, 35). By
speaking through the fence, the Paiute man and the group of people who travel
with him illustrate the "moving power of the voice" or the power of people who dare to speak.
These people are {60} demanding an end to five hundred
years of
injustices and their right to social, cultural, spiritual, political, and ecological
self-determination.
In his writing and speaking, Ortiz
continually celebrates the power of the voice, the power of speaking, to "change things in a good
way." For facing the
challenge of speaking first on so many interrelated social and environmental issues, I offer my
most deeply felt tribute to an artist who is demonstrating the
powerful role that poets and writers are playing in the environmental justice movement.

Di Chiro, Giovanna. "Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environmental and Social
Justice." UnCommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in
Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. 298-320.

Leal, Teresa. Personal conversation. Tucson, AZ. May 16, 2004.

Ortiz, Simon. Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, for the Sake of the Land.
Albuquerque: Institute of Native American Development--Native American
Studies, University of New Mexico, 1980. 33-35.

------. Seminar for "Poetics and Politics: A Series of Readings by Native American Writers."
U of Arizona, Tucson, February 3, 1992. Unpublished manuscript.

{61}

"Story Speaks for Us"

Centering the Voice of Simon Ortiz

P. JANE HAFEN

Too many years ago to mention, I gave my first professional conference paper at the Rocky
Mountain Modern Language Association. The topic of the paper was
Simon Ortiz's short story "Kaiser and the War." I was drawn to the story because Ortiz is a
Pueblo Indian, like myself, and the story is about a place and people I
know. However, I took a very structural approach, as I had been academically trained to do.
Mercifully, the text of the paper has disappeared along with the
obsolete 5 1/4-inch floppy disk where it was stored. Had I known more about Ortiz and his
writings at the time, had I followed his example of Pueblo resistance
and trusted my own tribal voice to be also an academic voice, the paper would have been much
different.
To summarize briefly, the argument
was that Kaiser is marked as a victim because his appearance and behavior disrupt the
community. Utilizing the
methodology of René Girard from Violence and the Sacred, I argued that
Kaiser represents a sacred victim whose sacrifice restores order to the community. One
reason he threatens the community is because he functions as a trickster. As a "safety valve" his
behaviors represent disorder to the authorities who try to make
him submit. Rather than tolerate him as a traditional community would, the police and draft
board throw Kaiser in jail. His punishment creates a sense of
communitas.
The flaw of this analysis (as I
remember it) is the general flaw of structuralism; the analysis becomes an end in and of itself.
However, at the time I was
starting graduate school, that was an approach I was {62}
taught, and it worked with the story. It was the kind of analysis that was accepted as a refereed
submission and contained sufficient jargon to suggest that I knew what I was positing.
I realize that this summary sounds like
a mea culpa for a youthful presentation. However, I think it raises another
interesting dilemma in American Indian
studies, the matters of where and how one learns the discipline of the field when many mentors
are well intentioned but ill informed and when institutions,
conferences, journals, and publishers reward traditional and colonial literary approaches. I was
fortunate enough to come under the tutelage and influence of
indigenous academics who pioneered a place for native studies. Ortiz's writings and interviews
became part of my education even though I did not meet him
personally until 1996.
Despite the inroads of indigenous
theorists, the recognition of Simon Ortiz and his writings at the Modern Language Association,
the publication of
definitive works by Robert Allen Warrior (Osage), Craig Womack (Muskogee Creek), and
LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), just to name a few, colonial criticism still
rules. Oddly enough, even early critics of Ortiz recognized that his writing and Native American
literature requires a critical approach apart from traditional
methodologies. In Simon Ortiz (1986) Andrew Wiget suggests that considering
Ortiz's writings as part of the "West" as "a concept rooted in the peculiar history
and mythos of Judeo-Christian Europe [. . .] is fundamentally alien and antagonistic to the many
distinctive culture and mythic perspectives unique to Native
America" (5). Additionally, Dean Rader observes the challenges of discussing American Indian
literatures: "Perhaps Anglos find Native American literature
elusive or inaccessible primarily because it reveals metaphors of expression of revelation or
participation regarding memory and history, while the dominant
Anglo cultural narrative employs metaphors of occlusion, deception and deferral" (76). Rader
goes on to note the challenges of finding critical literature about
Native American poetry, but he does encounter an abundance of interviews. He reiterates:
"[M]odern critical discourse does not know how to engage Native
American poetry the same way it addresses and critiques modern and postmodern Anglo poetry"
(77). Rader's essay offers ways of talking {63} about
Ortiz and
Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso with symbol and allegory. Nevertheless, the academy rules with
various articles about Ortiz that use traditional, mainstream critical
theories.
Ortiz himself has noted the limitations
of critical approaches to his writings. In an interview with Laura Coltelli he states:

The [critical] works that I have read, have, unfortunately--I would say 90
percent--a limited perspective, a limited view of my poetry. By that I mean that
too often their understanding of my poetry is based on their acceptance and judgment of what a
Native American should write about. He should write
about Native American settings, he should use images that are Native American, and should use
the language and values of that; otherwise he is not
acceptable. It is very stereotypical as well as racist, unfortunately, which is perhaps the main
concern that I have: critics who don't want to really
understand Native American people, that the Native America writer comes from his people. If a
critic doesn't understand that people and that land, then
he's not going to be able to discuss seriously or with any comprehension what the writer is
writing about. (115)

Ortiz not only identifies the
restrictions of many critical approaches, but he names them what they are: racist. These critical
methods are not racist in the
sense that they overtly demean or belittle American Indian writing; their racism lies in their
presumption to define standards for native writers and to impose
ideals that have nothing to do with native peoples and points of view.
Perhaps a lesson could be learned
from current trends in religious history studies. In a recent speech, "On Secular Bias in the Study
of Religion," Brad
Gregory posited that to understand history of the Reformation, historians had to allow for the
sincere beliefs and points of view of the objects of the history
(Forum). He was particularly critical of the so-called objectivity of social anthropologists who
attempt to intellectually distance themselves from their subjects.
Additionally James D. Tracy in "Believers, Non-Believers, and the Historian's Unspoken
Assumptions" states
{64}

graduate students of my generation took in as if through our pores the idea
that historical writing is scholarly only when it is intended for a public domain
governed by the canons of critical reason, a domain in which, by definition, no particular
religious and philosophical stance should have any privileges.
(403)

Simply put, they argue that to
understand Catholic history, historians must account for the Catholic beliefs and Catholic
culture's points of view in order to
interpret events. The positionality of these two Catholic historians is grounded in both
deconstructionist and Foucauldian theories.
Therefore, academicians have to take
only a short leap to enhance understanding of the otherness of American Indian literatures.
Native cultures, nations,
languages, and theories must be centered to be understood and interpreted. Learned theories can
become extensions of subordination and colonization when
hearts of indigenousness are ignored. Simon Ortiz clearly states how and where American Indian
literatures are foregrounded in a 1989 interview.

Native American literature is based on ritual and oral tradition. [. . .] In
terms of literary theme, land is a material reality as well as a philosophical,
metaphysical idea or concept; land is who we are, land is our identity, land is home place, land is
sacred. [. . .] The spiritual aspect of literature is [. . .]
responsibility and the insistence on that common shared responsibility [. . .] Another distinction
would be [. . .] "resistance literature" [. . .] decolonization
and liberation literature. (364-65)

Further in his essay "Towards a
National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism," Ortiz argues for a singing,
dancing, "community fulfilled
in its most complete sense of giving and receiving," and, again, "resistance--political, armed,
spiritual--which has been carried out by the oral tradition" (7, 10). In
this interview and essay, along with other sources, Ortiz is consistent and clear about what he
sees as vital in native literatures. {65}
Simon Ortiz's graceful voice and my
own years of experience presented a new way of reading "Kaiser and the War" when I recently
taught it. With more
confidence, I no longer tried to apply an interesting but ultimately irrelevant theory to the story.
The narrative begins in first person, a youthful narrator who was
in the fourth grade when Kaiser was released from jail. The anecdotal tone of the first person
underscores the idea of orality.1 Readers learn about Kaiser by what
and how the narrator tells in the story. The tradition of orality becomes an issue of resistance
when the narrator reveals that Kaiser could neither read nor write
prior to his incarceration nor could he completely understand the proceedings that were
conducted in English. Kaiser is subjected to the power of the colonizers,
their judicial system, and their language.
Additionally, the narrator tells of his
grandfather who "would tell us stories about the olden times." The grandfather, "a healer and
kiva elder" is steeped in
the ritual of storytelling. Kaiser begins to tell the stories himself (26).
Kaiser seeks refuge on Black Mesa.
This detail centers the story in a place of indigenousness and refuge. The law enforcement
officials, the sheriff, another
police officer, and a Bureau of Indian Affairs agent, could not negotiate "the country around
Black Mesa. It's rougher than hell up there" (27). Kaiser, who
knows the land and is the land, outlasts the attempts to find him. The tribal
members are deputized and make half-hearted efforts to assist the law, but spend
much of their time laughing and ridiculing the futile search.
Surprisingly, Kaiser decides to
volunteer for the army. Grandfather Faustin (a recurring character in Ortiz's short stories) tries to
dissuade him and directly
forbids him. Kaiser resists, though, acknowledging that Faustin does not have the matrilineal
authority to order his staying home. Matrineal authority is
established through clan descendancy in many Pueblo cultures. Nevertheless, Faustin and the
narrator's grandfather ritually bless Kaiser before he leaves. The
communal sanctification also emphasizes spiritual aspects of the story.
The story jumps to Kaiser's
incarceration in the state pen. Even though Grandfather Faustin passes away, the tribal members
con-{66}tinue to check on
Kaiser, and eventually retrieve him. Kaiser seems demoralized and dispirited by his experience.
He wears a gray suit everywhere, for every occasion. Despite his
unusual behaviors, Kaiser is tolerated and cared for by the community. Kaiser dies, without the
suit, on tribal lands. He tells his sister to return the suit to the
government. The last line of the story concludes, "And then [someone] figured, well, maybe
that's the way it was when you went into the state pen or the army
and became an American" (38). Although Kaiser succumbs to his circumstances in terms
established and defined by the colonizers, the tribal community accepts
him. They cannot liberate him from the mental and physical incarceration and its consequences,
but they still embrace him. The communal acceptance and
protection are a story of liberation over the law.
Kaiser's story of resistance resonates
with Ortiz's Acoma Pueblo heritage. The historical legacy of Acoma reveals that Ortiz is a
descendant of survival. His
ancestors survived the Acoma massacre of 1599 where more than fifteen hundred men, women,
and children were slaughtered by the Spanish conquistadores
(Francis 39). In 1680 the Rio Grande pueblos of what is now New Mexico revolted against the
Spanish and drove them from the area. For twelve years the
Pueblos kept the Spanish at bay, yet in 1692 the colonizers returned with vengeance and
violence, which our Pueblo ancestors again survived. Even in the
twentieth century the Pueblos united in a formal organization, the All Indian Pueblo Council, to
resist and defeat the land-grabbing Bursum Bill of 1922. That
organization continues today and is where Simon's father and my father (Taos Pueblo) worked
together for the good of the Pueblo peoples.
Simon Ortiz gives readers the keys to
understanding his writing. His works are centered in indigenousness--land, language, and
survival. His heritage is the
cultural and historical context of Pueblo resistance that manifests not only in Kaiser's story but
also in the body of Ortiz's work. There is no better way to
celebrate the grace of his voice and to honor his works than to place his own voice at the center
of understanding his writings.

{67}

NOTE

1. For an excellent discussion of how oral traditions work in modern native literatures see
Wilson, "Speaking of Home." Wilson discusses Ortiz in particular and
refutes Arnold Krupat's dismissal of orality.

WORKS
CITED

Francis, Lee (Laguna Pueblo). Native Time: A Historical Time Line of Native
America. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.

You have to not only see color but you must touch it, in a sense become that color, know it,
let it become part of you. I think that old man knows. I like to watch
him. He pushed his steel rim glasses with bony knuckles back up the bridge of his nose. I call
him Touching Man. Simon Ortiz,
"Two Old Men"

I must have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to steal a big bag which
was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into this bag, and
there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in and feet out. My feet have been so
cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might
be laid in the gnashes. Frederick
Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Great distances of time, culture, place, and race separate Frederick Douglass from Simon J.
Ortiz, but they are close enough to touch. Both know that they have
life-giving stories to tell about the beauties and injustices of their times and places--times and
places that are so far removed from most of their readers that they
have to find powerful rhetorical strategies that invite those readers to allow the distant to
"become part of [them]." Ortiz is especially conscious of this challenge.
In the opening pages of Woven Stone (1992) he defines his literary calling as
"[m]aking language familiar and accessible to others, bringing it within their grasp
and comprehension, [this] is what a writer, teacher, and storyteller does or tries to do. I've been
trying for {69} over thirty years" (3-4).1
"Grasp" is indeed a
strong component of his mission. Like Douglass, Ortiz is a master of tactile imagery, and he uses
this mastery to transform topics as remote and small as a dry
root in a wash and as hidden and apocalyptic as the Jackpile uranium mine into living parts of us.
In this informal appreciation--a small catalogue of poem
excerpts with brief discussion--I can only skim the richness of this grasping. But my skimming at
least suggests the diversity and sophistication of Ortiz's tactile
imagery that makes graspable the death and destruction of people and land; the complexity of
place and time; celebrations of creation and re-creation; and
moving insights into a hope that mingles with loss, a hidden beauty and faith in survival in places
of death, and a sense of loneliness that proclaims a deep sense
of wonder.
Ortiz is known for his condemnation
of technological and governmental forces that wreak havoc in Indian Country. Three of his
poems indicate the variety
of ways he uses tactile images to voice his protests. In the "Electrical Lines" section of "The
state's claim . . . ," he personifies a machine ("it pointed") that tears
up the earth:

When they were putting up the
lines,
there was this machine.
The machine had a long shiny
drill
which it pointed at the ground
and drove it turning into the
earth
and almost suddenly there was a hole
(A Good Journey 256)

In "For Our Brothers: Blue Jay, Gold Finch, Flicker, and Squirrel," the impact of highway
construction and cars is brought as close as a touch of fur, mutilated
fur:

I touch it [a squirrel corpse]
gently and then try
to lift it, to toss it
into some high grass,
but its fur comes loose.
It is glued heavily
to the ground with its rot {70}
and I put my foot
against it and push it
into the grass, being careful
that it remains upright
and is facing the rainwater
that will wash it downstream.
(A Good Journey 253-54)

The use of the tactile imagery in this poem is typical; Ortiz often saves powerful tactile
images for climactic sections of his poems (in this case squirrel is the last
of four road-kill victims) and images of touch are frequently enhanced by synesthesia (here the
"smell" of "disintegration" immediately follows the above quoted
lines).
Possibly the most potent example of
touching the core of technological and governmental impact appears in "Ray's Story," a poem
from the "Too Many
Sacrifices" section of Fight Back (1980). Despite the humor of the opening--the
focus of the poem is "Lacey, from Muskogee," who is known for his enormous
member--"Gawd, the Okies would say, / that Indian is big"--the foreman's (Ray's) story is one of
impending doom (299). Lacey's job is the most dangerous in the
uranium mine. He has to stand by the "vibrating chute" to watch for debris (drill bits, cables,
timbers) mixed with the ore that could plug up the "Primary
Crusher." When spotted, the debris has to be extracted by reaching, or even crawling, in to get it
after signaling to stop the movement. According to the "official
report," Lacy tried to grab for a moving cable, became tangled, and was sucked in, "right down
into the jaws" of the crusher (301). Instead of the up-close view
Ortiz offered in "For Our Brothers," we get indirect touches: the Forman became aware of the
tragedy when he noticed that the crushed ore "was wetter than
usual" and when he spotted the "only thing / that had been noticeable about Lacy before" (302).
This instance of distancing from the actual process of crushing
by concentrating on the "results" implies both the horror of the event--a death and dismembering
beyond words--and the ways technology and destructive
policies can distort the very meaning of life and death. Lacey's fate is a sickening tale of from
dust to dust.
Many of Ortiz's poems, especially in
Good Journey and Fight Back,{71} imply or describe the destructive effects of technology and
governmental policies
on the land of the Southwest. But as reviewers and scholars have noticed ever since the
publication of his first collection, Going for the Rain (1976), Ortiz
celebrates the restorative powers of the land that offer healing counter forces in a technological
world. Again tactile imagery plays a key role in making healing
landscapes seem close at hand. After the dislocations of the second ("Leaving") and most of the
third ("Returning") sections of Going for the Rain, one of the
hopeful signs of change occurs near the conclusion of the third section in "East of Tucumcari." A
man on a bus surprises the bus driver by asking to get off
"sixteen miles east of Tucumcari"; he is "coming home," a home signaled by the "brown water /
falling from a rock" but most of all by a literal act of feeling: "It
felt so good / to touch the green moss" (116). This feeling of home is immediately linked by
juxtaposition to images of fecundity, femininity, and origins of
regeneration:

It felt so good
to touch the green moss.
A woman between
the mountain ridges
of herself--
it is overwhelming. (116)

To the eye, the setting of "Dry
Root in a Wash" expresses a striking contrast to the moisture of home's "green moss." But as in
this poem from the fourth
section of Going for the Rain ("The Rain Falls"), there is almost always more than
meets the eye in Ortiz's poetry. In a subtle process of synesthesia, the visual
images of the juniper root and the Shiwana "upstream" are framed by stated and implied tactile
experiences. "The sand is fine grit / and warm to the touch,"
opens the poem; "Underneath the fine sand / it is cool / with crystalline moisture, / the forming
rain" closes it (140). The speaker of this poem invites readers to
permeate the dry wash visual images with tactile feelings of fineness and warm moisture and
then fulfills those feelings with the promise of a dazzling
("crystalline") regeneration.{72}
There is more than the mixing of sight
and touch in "East of Tucumcari" and "Dry Root in a Wash." As in most of his landscape images,
there is the mixing
of place and time: a touch of green moss becomes an emblem of the timeless forces of Earth
Mother's creativity; a dry root reminds impatient humans to feel the
promise of renewal in the warmth and hidden moisture of Her skin. Other poems strong in tactile
imagery address more directly the continuity of the ages made
manifest in the present. "Old Hills," one of the early poems in the second section of Going
for the Rain, opens with a humorously provocative progression of
understatement to hyperbole:

West of Ocotillo Wells,
the hills are pretty old.
In fact, they're older than any
signs
telling the tourists where they're
at,
older than all of millennium's
signpainters. (69)

The storytelling voice in this poem contrasts this depth of time with the shortsighted way a
group of students measure their experience in these hills. They are
making a film "worth six credit hours" (69). Again a tactile image heightens the contrast in the
climactic lines that echo the opening and blend sight and touch to
evoke memories of the ancient ocean that covered the Southwest:

These hills are pretty old.
Some have worn down to flat desert
valley.
Some stones remember being
underwater
and the cool fresh green winds.
(69)

Ortiz can also capture the touch of
the past in images of humans as old as the hills. "Curly Mustache, 101-Year-Old Navajo Man"
follows "Dry Root in a
Wash" in Going for the Rain. "Curly Mustache" imaginatively gathers central
regenerative images from this collection: hands, roots, hills, mountains, water,
wind, and the poet as ancient trickster-cricket/cicada. The climactic stanza once again invites
{73} closeness (in this case to great antiquity) with a
tactile image
charged with sight and sound:

A thousands of years
old cicada
here one moment,
one place
in millennia.

Tell me about the glaciers.
Tell me if this is correct
what I have heard: the scrape
of a glacier sounds
like a touching wind
on stone, wood,
in someplace mountain dream.
(141-42)

New life poems express some of
Ortiz's most moving expressions of the time depths of the present and of regenerative forces
operating in the timeless
present. It is significant, though certainly not surprising, that the first personalized signs of new
life in the opening section of Going for the Rain ("The
Preparation") come in the form of tactile images:

O child's tremble
against your mother's innerwall,
is a true movement
without waste or hesitation,
a beating of wings
following ancient trails
to help us return. (42)

The miraculous flutter of the human fetus energizes this and other poems (for instance, "The
Expectant Father"), but Ortiz doesn't limit himself to the touch of
new human life. An especially poignant poem expressing the spontaneous and profound
interconnections between {74} the old and the young and
among plant,
animal, and human new life hinges upon a tactile image of new (mice) life. In "My Father's
Song" a recollected child's voice recalls a rather ordinary interruption
to the ritual of corn planting that a father's insight and love transformed into an extraordinary
learning experience:

We planted corn one Spring at
Aacqu--
we planted several times
but this one particular time
I remember the soft damp sand
in my hand.

My father had stopped at one
point
to show me an overturned
furrow,
the plowshare had unearthed
the burrow nest of a mouse
in the soft moist sand.

Very gently, he scooped tiny pink
animals
into the palm of his hand
and told me to touch them.
We took them to the edge
of the field and put them in the
shade
of a sand moist clod.

I remember the very
softness
of cool and warm sand and tiny
alive
mice and my father saying things.
(57-58)

"My Father's Song" highlights an
unstated motif running through my comments about Ortiz's ability to evoke closeness with tactile
imagery: the central role
of hands. Hence it is appropriate that I conclude this brief appreciation essay by concentrating on
two of his best hands poems: "A Story of How a Wall Stands"
from Going for the Rain and the "Two Old Men" section of "Poems from the
Veterans Hospital" from A Good Journey. Both echo themes of death and
destruction. As readers of Fighting Back know, the setting of the former--the
{75} wall of the ancient graveyard at Aacqu--is a
stone-hard reminder of many
deaths going back to and before the successful Pueblo revolt of 1680 and the retaliatory massacre
against Acoma in 1692. The latter more directly images the
results of modern wars: a relevant "Indian" topic since in the twentieth century a higher
percentage of American Indians have volunteered for the armed services
than any other ethnic group in the United States. Both poems acknowledge by implication the
dark sides of mortality, but the hands-on tactile imagery helps to
balance the darkness with solid foundations of love and wonder.
As in "My Father's Song," the father
in one of Ortiz's most frequently anthologized and discussed poems "A Story of How a Wall
Stands" turns an everyday
(though extraordinary) sight at Aacqu into a powerful teaching experience. An ancient stone wall
somehow restrains the weight of "tons of earth and bones"--"a
graveyard built on a steep incline;" the father explains that the surface of the wall, which "looks
like loose stone," is underpinned by stones carefully "woven
together" and secured by mud expertly mixed "to a certain texture" (Going for the
Rain 145). This sensible engineering lesson helps to explain the longevity of
the wall (and graveyard) and helps readers to understand the origin of the title of Ortiz's
collection Woven Stone. But the real power of the "lesson" is in the
father's hands. In each of the three stanzas, the hands demonstrate, dramatize, and personalize,
making the unseen foundation familiar to the young man and an
unfamiliar, remote structure as accessible as the memories of a parent's touch and gestures to a
willing reader. The repetition of the words constitutes auditory
and visual reinforcement of the repeated hand motions:

and with his hands he puts the
stone and mud
in place.
[. . .]

He ties one hand over the
other,
fitting like the bones of his
hands
and fingers
[. . .] {76}
he says, "the mud mixed
to a certain texture," patiently
"with the fingers," worked
in the palm of his hand.
[. . .]

He tells me those things,
the story of them worked
with his fingers, in the palm
of his hands, working the stone
and the mud until they become
the wall that stands a long, long time.
(Going for the Rain 145)

By the end of the poem Ortiz has woven the wall, hands, and story into one graspable
mystery.
"Two Old Men" has attracted less
attention than "A Story of How a Wall Stands," but it expresses a touch as powerful as the
lessons gestured by Ortiz's
father. The "Poems from the Veterans Hospital" focus on "men broken / from three American
wars" (A Good Journey 270), a topic and place distant from many
readers and a topic that could easily invite depressing stereotypes of Indian victimization and
alcoholism. The particular subject of "Two Old Men" is a silent
old man--"He has never said a word that I have heard" (A Good Journey 271).
wandering at the edge of a marsh. Instead of pitying this lonely, weak-eyed
veteran, the observant voice of the poem is captivated, even awed, at the joy this nameless
veteran's hands see in the colors of a common "tangle" of "autumn
rushes":

He believes that colors
have shape, texture, substance,
depth, life he can touch.
I know they do.
I believe him.
When he is reaching
his long bony fingers
to a lettered sign{77}
or a dark spot in the sidewalk,
there are the frankest features
of delight, surprise, wonder
in his face.

I believe him.
[. . . ]

Form is not all
nor hearing
for the tensile mass
vibrates against
my tendrils
the mind that sprouts
and reaches into depths
of the tips of my fingers.

He touches me with spider
tendrils.
[. . .]

Touching Man, you know things
only
a very few know, and that is your
strength
your aloneness.(A Good
Journey 272-73)

As in his best poetry, Ortiz does not hide the suffering and loneliness of this "Touching
Man," a torment that often reflects five hundred years of suffering at the
hands of European and American wars and ways. But he also infuses this story with senses of
survival, wonder, and delight that are made accessible to readers
far from Acoma Pueblo by Ortiz's powerful sense of touch.
Certainly Ortiz's other poetic
senses--his conversational tone, his narrative skills, his creative use of explanatory prose, and his
use of visual and auditory
imagery--can bring readers close to his landscapes and concerns. And certainly there are many
other significant examples of his power of touch (recall, for
instance, in From Sand Creek [1981, 1999], the frightening image of blood spurting
on the plains so forcefully that hands were as helpless as sieves at containing
the outpouring). But I hope this rather old-fashioned bit of New {78} Critical image hunting and informal admiration offers
insights into the intricate layers of
Ortiz's craft and politics. One of the most important types of cultural and political "work" that
American Indian authors can do is the creation of works that, to
borrow words from the prose of "Two Old Men," invite readers, "not only to see," but to "touch"
and "in a sense become" part of the realities of oppression and
destruction, senses of place, time, and balance, and the gift of love and delight in the midst of
graveyards and loneliness. Ortiz's grasp of the power of touch
makes him one of the revered workers in these fields:

It doesn't end.
In all growing
from all earths
to all skies.
in all touching
all things,
in all soothing
the aches of all years,
it doesn't end. (Going for the
Rain 147)

NOTE

1. All the quoted poems in this essay appear in Woven Stone (1992), which
gathers together three of Ortiz's previous collections: Going for the Rain (1976),
A
Good Journey (1977), and an updated version of Fight Back: For the Sake of the
People, For the Sake of the Land (1980). Citations include the appropriate
collection title and page number from Woven Stone. I would like to thank Simon
Ortiz for permission to quote from Woven Stone.

work cited

Ortiz, Simon J. Woven Stone. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1992.

{79}

Resistance and Continuance through Cultural
Connections in Simon J. Ortiz's Out There Somewhere

PATRICE HOLLRAH

Simon J. Ortiz explains that the title of his 2002 collection of poetry, Out There
Somewhere, is intended to mean "out there somewhere in everyday experience
somewhere in America" (ix). He adds, "But while I have physically been away from my home
area, I have never been away in any absolute way" (ix). The poems
in Out There Somewhere attest to the cultural connections that Ortiz maintains
even though he might be in some location other than the Acoma Pueblo. The
resistance one finds in the poems--against mainstream political, social, and economic
forces--results in continuance of Ortiz's Acoma heritage. That natives can
still be natives when they are away from their tribal homelands speaks to those who
are urban natives, which is over two-thirds of the native population in the
United States: those natives who have left the reservation for economic reasons; those native
tribes who have no land base; those natives who have no federal
recognition as official native tribes; and those natives who for reasons of patrilineal or matrilineal
descent have no tribal affiliation. Although they are "out there
somewhere," they continue to be native, as Ortiz so deftly demonstrates. A political thread runs
through Ortiz's earlier poetry collections, and this essay looks at
a few of the poems in Out There Somewhere to see how this literature of resistance
continues through cultural connections.
In the preface to Out There
Somewhere Ortiz writes, "Yet at the same time that we are away, we also continue to be
absolutely connected socially and
culturally to our Native identity. We insist that we as human cultural beings must always have
this connection because it {80} is the way we maintain a
Native
sense of Existence" (ix). In the first section of the book, "Margins," the opening poem,
"Headlands Journal," speaks to the issues for which Ortiz is so well
known. Ortiz was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts (HCA) in Sausalito,
California, in 1994. The HCA "seeks to explore and interpret
the relationship between place and the creative process, and to extend appreciation for the role of
artists in society" (Headlands). The poem has ten entries, dated
from June 14 through July 14, and Ortiz reports on the conversations with his fellow-artists, the
food, the weather, his health, alcoholism, memories, family, and
a strong political attack on the U.S. government. The first entry is framed with romanticized
descriptions of the moon: "The moon, the moon, the best kind of
sky is the sunset light of the Pacific Ocean. Suddenly I'm too lonesome again" (3). In contrast, the
central part of the first entry critically comments on the
disproportionate number of natives in the Alaska state prisons: "When I say Alaska has a 17
percent Native population in the state and 70 percent Native inmate
population in its state prisons, Victor shakes his head. Tanure nods yes, yes" (3). Both artists are
from other countries, Victor from Mexico and Tanure from
Nigeria, but they understand the injustice in the legal and penal systems that oppress
dark-skinned people and those on the "margins."
In the second entry, dated June 16,
Ortiz has an exchange at dinner with three artists from China. One of the two interpreters with
them is white, and when
Ortiz asks him how he learned to speak Chinese, he says, "Because of the diplomatic corps";
Ortiz thinks to himself, "[O]h shit the fucking CIA" (4). The
progression from the opening romanticized description of the moon to critiquing state prisons
and federal organizations, which deal in foreign intelligence and
national security, leads to the final verbal assault on the U.S. government in the ninth entry. The
progression symbolizes romanticized notions of American
Indians that are demythologized by the reality of oppressive institutions of authority.
Ortiz contemplates the idea of "risk"
in art that takes place at the HCA on land managed by the U.S. Park Service, and eventually
concludes, "There is
nothing at risk in this fucked up nation and epoch. / THEY got it all. And they don't have to risk.
/ THEY want us to risk. {81} But for THEM, there is no
risk"
(8, 9). The resentment toward "white people especially" builds to hypothetical resistance in
imagining the kind of "risk" they could take (10):

What would happen if we put up
signs saying NO ENTRY.
PRIVATE PROPERTY.
Signs which stated U.S. GOVERNMENT
STAY OUT.
Signs which state:ATTENTION LIARS,
THIEVES, AND KILLERSYou have stolen
enough land and life.From here on out, you are
no longer allowed access.
We
claim back our land and life.
Go away.
(9)

The entry goes on to consider the
nature of "risk," noting that it must be more than personal: "It has to concern itself with ethical,
moral, political, social,
historical, spiritual, material issues and questions. Personal risk is the least at stake" (10). In
accusing the U.S. government of stealing land and life, Ortiz relies
completely on his Acoma Pueblo cultural connections for the history of colonization, a history
that is never separated from him no matter where he travels. By
examining the "relationship between place and the creative process," the mission of the HCA,
Ortiz engages in an artistic act of resistance and decolonization,
imagining the possibilities for a different relationship between the U.S. government and native
peoples, one in which the natives are in control.
Ortiz ponders a different kind of
relationship--social interaction--in "Essentialism," also from the opening section, "Margins."
After insisting that he knows
"more about being Indian than [the reader]," he vents his frustrations in an unpunctuated stream
of consciousness about inane questions that challenge his
identity:

man sometimes i feel like punching someone out or even killing it's
so crazy you know you just feel like when you get those stupid ass questions like some
kind of test not that they're even serious queries but feel more like deliberate harassing and
demeaning {82}ones that get you so riled
you squirm and
fidget and think insane twisted thoughts your emotions tangling and twisting your face and
making you swallow hard (15)

Ortiz asks, "Is essentialism untenable? Or is essentialism tenable?" (15). He has always
answered this kind of question by referring back to his Acoma Pueblo
culture:

There is hope. It is in what past generations of our people have always said.
As long as we keep believing in and living by the ways of our people, we will
continue. As long as the story of our struggles, which is like the story of all people who deeply
love and respect themselves and their culture, community,
and land, is told, we the people will continue. (Surviving Columbus)

Ortiz frequently speaks about continuance through his cultural connections even when he is
"out there somewhere" and people ask racist questions about his identity.
Ortiz repeats the familiar theme of
continuance and communal worldview as the supplicant prays in the first-person plural in "In the
Moment Before,"
another poem from the opening section:

As he prayed, he thought:
the land, the way of life, the
community.
Ours. Our own. Our heart, blood,
soul.
Yours, the grandmothers and
grandfathers said.
Yours, ours, yours, ours, always,
always. (21)

The title alludes to the moment before contact, when the indigenous inhabitants of the
Americas could not imagine how their lives would change after contact.
Ortiz acknowledges the ancestors and the future as he thinks of what is most important in his
Acoma Pueblo heritage: land, culture, and community. These
aspects of life are what constitute the peoples' ontological identity, and they will remain the same
forever for everyone. In the second stanza, the speaker reasons
why there must be resistance in the people's lives: "As he thought, he {83} prayed: / always this is ours, our way of life, / this is why we
must fight for ourselves,
always" (21). Having established what makes up life for the Acoma Pueblo community, the
speaker argues that the people must fight to maintain that life, or the
unspoken result is that their way of life will no longer be. Ortiz also equates thinking with
praying, erasing any boundaries between intellectual thought and
spiritual meditation, by having the two activities exist simultaneously. Not privileging one
activity over the other, he reverses their order at the beginning of
stanzas 1 and 2. To conclude the poem, the speaker moves from the past verb tense to the eternal
present and recommends what action the people must take:
"And today, we must think as we pray: / always one with our struggle, hope, and continuance, /
always for the sake of the land, culture, and community" (21).
Yet again, Ortiz urges the community to understand that as a group they must continually think
of their resistance to outside forces in order to preserve their way
of life, their identity, and their future.
The second section of Out
There Somewhere is titled "Images," and the poems are just that--images of natives, some
of themselves and some that others
have of them. The opening poem, "`Being Poor' and Powerless. And Refusing Again," deals with
the economics of being native. The speaker thinks of himself
when he does not have any money and the sense of helplessness that accompanies poverty: "I
think of myself. Being poor, feeling mostly powerlessness because
of it. I know, I know, poverty doesn't have to mean powerlessness. Yet that's how it mostly is"
(35). Ortiz illustrates a history of natives being economically
disadvantaged by the time line and characters in the poem. Roxanne calls the speaker and asks
him, "Guess who's back in town?" (35). The speaker remembers
back twenty-five years, but cannot think who might be in town. When Roxanne tells him that
Mendoza has been living in a shack and is very poor, she "adds
without sympathy, `He reminds me of my father'" (35). Hence, there are four native characters
who understand poverty in a generational way: the speaker,
Roxanne, her father, and Mendoza. However, Mendoza is, according to Roxanne, "still at it,"
which implies survival (35). The speaker remembers times in the
past that he has been poor but refuses to be poor in spirit: "And I think of myself at times
counting my {84} last pennies again. Feeling poor.
Feeling poor again
and again yet at the same time also refusing poverty I think" (35). The refusal is the struggle to
endure despite the overwhelming odds of economic
disenfranchisement. In fact, Ortiz compares the desperation that poverty engenders to the
Unabomber's agenda and wonders "how many of us have made plans
for bombs intended for corporations, their banks, and the police state that protects them from the
poor and the powerless" (35). The conclusion indicates the
extremes to which poverty will drive people and the resistance that people will affect toward the
rich and powerful.
Another poem from the second
section, "Welcome to America the Mall," deals with economics and natives. After defining the
mall with brand names and
familiar chain stores, the speaker complains about a white friend who proudly boasts, "I'm glad
my children are not consumer oriented" (43). The speaker agrees,
but he is also angry about the class differences:

I'm glad also.
But it pisses me off she can say
that.
That she should say that.
With no compunction about it.
That she and her children can
afford
not to be consumer oriented. (43)

The friend's obliviousness to her family's status and privilege, to their ability to make a
conscious decision about whether to engage in the capitalistic enterprise of
shopping at the mall, reveals the gap between the middle and lower classes. The speaker is
sympathetic to those who do not have the freedom to make such a
decision, and he accusingly remarks, "This is America where poor people have to pay for bare
survival" (44). In a country where malls have an abundance of
goods, as listed at the beginning of the poem, the speaker implies that there is injustice in the
inequality among classes when there are those who can scarcely eke
out a living. He indicts those who are blind to the condition of the have-nots and reminds them
that everyone is implicated in the production of goods and
services: "This is the Mall. / Welcome. / {85} Because
we're within it" (44). The inclusive "we" refers to natives, who work in the mall in low-paying
service
jobs, as well as the white consumers, who have the money to spend in the stores, and the mall
represents the United States as a capitalistic nation. The critique of
this system is resistance against the economic forces that keep the classes separate. Oritz's
indignation at the insensitivity to the poor is reflective of his belief that
people have responsibilities in life to those around them. In commenting on the stories of native
authors, he writes that their stories "make sure that the voice
keeps singing forth so that the earth power will not cease, and that the people remain fully aware
of their social, economic, political, cultural, and spiritual
relationships and responsibilities to all things" (Earth Power vii-viii).
In "Gifts," part three of Out
There Somewhere, Ortiz writes about the gifts that he finds in life, the new possibilities
for hope, family, love, and regeneration,
whether they are in the children and the promise of their future or in the natural world. In "Our
Children Will Not Be Afraid," he speaks of his obligation to the
earth:

Marking my own stricken yet
struggling word, I owe
something
to this Earth Our Mother. Let my debt
be without loss;
let it be with song, joyous, affirmed,
loving.
For the reason is I am alive, you are
alive, we are alive! (68)

The relationship to the earth and its support of life is clear, and the speaker asks for
celebration of that sustenance through his writing, words that continue the
"struggle" for survival. Ortiz has pointed out the relationship between language, the people, and
survival: "There have always been those words which evoked
meaning and the meaning's magical wonder. There has always been the spirit which inspired the
desire for life to go on. And it has been through the words of the
songs, the prayers, the stories that the people have found a way to continue, for life to go on"
(Earth Power vii). He also recognizes the possibilities for today's
children, predicting that they will succeed because of the inspiration of the ancestors and famous
warriors of the past:{86}
Our children will welcome the call
and song into their
breasts.
Their dreams will be engendered by
Popée, Tecumseh, Crazy
Horse,
Chief Joseph, Geronimo, and all our
grandmothers
and grandfathers.
And they will hear them say their lives
are our lives,
their hearts our
hearts.
And they will come to know it will
not be the thieves,
killers, liars
but our people who will have victory!
(69)

Naming the well-known warriors who resisted the encroachment of the whites, who fought
for their people's land against the injustice of the U.S. government,
signifies continuance through cultural connections to the past. Ortiz honors a history of Native
American political resistance.
In the fourth section, "Horizons,"
Ortiz looks at the possibilities beyond him, "out there somewhere," and includes poems in his
native Keres language with
an accompanying English version. In the opening poem of the cycle "Acoma Poems," "Kuutra
Tsah-tseh-ma Srutai-kyuiyah" (Your Life You Are Carrying), he
addresses again the relationship between the land and people: "This is the dirt / This is the land. /
This is ours" (90). The land belongs to the natives, and the
speaker claims that the people carry the earth rather than the earth carrying the people: "Dirt you
are holding. / Land you are carrying. / Your life you are
carrying" (91). People carrying the earth indicates a responsibility to the land, one of protection, a
reciprocal relationship in which their very survival is at stake.
Frequently Ortiz has commented on the relationship between the land and native writers: "[T]he
inspiration and source for contemporary Indian literature [. . .] is
the acknowledgement by Indian writers of a responsibility to advocate for their people's
self-government, sovereignty, and control of land and natural
resources" ("Towards a National Indian Literature" 12, emphasis added). In the poem's
deceptively simple message, there is {87} an element of
action that
people should take: "This is what I am showing and telling you. / This is what I am telling and
showing you" (91). Language and action cannot be separated. If
people carry the land, they must also "control" their land, resisting the forces that would not
allow that.
In "Ever," the fifth section of
Somewhere Out There, the poems are about relationships among people, the
natural environment, and time, in that memories
continue forever. In "Tsegi Canyon," the speaker begins with the single word "Motel," a place
that connotes a transitory nature, but the symbol is immediately
followed by "at the edge of stone," which implies a sense of permanence, such as the Tsegi
Canyon will always have (116). The third line is simply "deep sigh,"
so there is serious emotion to be found in this setting (116). The speaker fears that the "deep
sigh" "may be the last," but by the end of the poem he understands
"It will not be the last / place, words, or motel" (116). In other words, the natural environment
will continue, the words expressing emotion will continue, and the
temporary places where people come together when traveling, such as in motels, will also
continue. Life will go on. The underlying theme is continuance.
The final section, "Connections After
All," returns to a more political tone with the poems that frame this part: "Beginning and Ending
Song: Part I" and
"Beginning and Ending Song: Part II." There are connections for Indians "out there somewhere,"
both positive and negative. There are positive connections in
"Smiling for Victory": "Don't anybody ever tell you that it is all in vain. / Don't anybody ever tell
you that Indians never smile. / Just look at all those smiles!"
(156). Ortiz subverts the stereotypical image of the stoic Indian who never wins and humorously
affirms the survival of Indians "out there somewhere." Humor is
also apparent in "Beginning and Ending Song: Part II" as the speaker resists the judiciary system
by refusing to pay fifty dollars in bail to avoid a fifty-day
sentence: "No way I'll stay or pay, Judge" (157). The guilty party refuses to participate in an
"either-or" situation, to do jail time or pay the fine. Instead, he
accuses the judge as the guilty one: "You honor no honor, Judge" (158). The "honor" alludes to
the treaties in this country that the U.S. government has not
honored. Thus, the speaker exhibits resistance, rejects {88} the verdict that others have handed him, and decides instead
to survive on his own terms. He will not
be incarcerated by a history of oppression and injustice. Repeatedly Ortiz has explained how
natives have survived:

Throughout the difficult experience of colonization to the present, Indian
women and men have struggled to create meaning of their lives in very definite
and systematic ways. The ways or methods have been important, but they are important only
because of the reason for the struggle. And it is that
reason--the struggle against colonialism--which has given substance to what is authentic.
("Towards a National Indian Literature" 9)

"The Beginning and the End"
represents an endless story of how the speaker maintains his authenticity as a native, no matter
where he is, whether in his
home community, an urban location, or "out there somewhere" in America, and he does so
through his cultural connections.

------. Out There Somewhere. Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literature
Series 49. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2002.

------. Surviving Columbus: The Story of the Pueblo People. KNME-TV
Albuquerque and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Program Concept and Initial
Development Larry Walsh. Prod. Larry Walsh and Edmund J. Ladd. Dir. Diane Reyna. Writer
Larry Walsh. Original poetry written by Simon Ortiz and Rina
Swentzell. West Los Angeles: PBS Home Video, 1992.

There is a revolution going on; it is very spiritual and its manifestation is economic, political,
and social. Look to the horizon and listen. Simon
Ortiz, From Sand Creek

Simon, I want to thank you in this way.
I want to honor you for what you have done for us.1
I don't want to use the language of academia
or its forms
because I want to thank you from the place where you touch me . . .
somewhere in my spirit.

You spoke to Tsis-tsis-tas sorrow
and I saw your word-magic
ease the hardness in the eyes of tomorrow.
You have taken our wounds and showed us
their counterparts
in each other,
from place to specific place,
from tribe to tribe,
from man to woman to child,
from generations past into the future.

You took our Aunties and Uncles,
writers from many tribes,

{90}

Beadwork by Bobbi Ann Blackbear.
(Photo courtesy of the author.)

{91}

and showed them a road,
back in Al . . . bur-quer-que,
back in the 70s.
You put their feet on a path
and held their hands,
pulled them along into song
and re-story-ing the Peoples.
Yes, I know you all had your tears,
Your moments of cloudy anger,
but Love was at the center of it all,
and fire spread from your belly to theirs.
We still warm our hands at it now.
It still creeps through our palms,
en nos brazos,
en nos corazones,
and flames out in our tongues,
filling the air with smoke, cinder, and new growth.

You have gifted us--Wa-do.
You have fathered us--Ma-do.
You have mothered us--Ya-ko-ke.
You have guided us--Ni-a'-she-men.

Tonight, when I look up,
You are there.

I will follow you until morning,
where, transformed,
our children will map trails by you
for seven generations more.

NOTE

1. The Cheyenne look to the
Morning Star to find their way, and that is how they regrouped after the massacre at Sand Creek.
Because of the impact of
From Sand Creek on my Cheyenne students, I thought this was an appropriate
metaphor for Simon. Also, Simon has guided us all--he really is the one who
broke ground and guided the whole American Indian literary re-{92}naissance back in Albuquerque in the seventies. Where
would any of us be without him?
Moreover, he taught us all to look beyond a narrow tribalism and see what we have in common
with each other, with the world. The moccasin in the illustration
is a Cheyenne Morning Star pattern.

{93}

The Work That Must Be Done

DANIEL HEATH JUSTICE

Although I can clearly recall the first day I met Simon, the memory of that afternoon doesn't
quite fit my sense of reasonable time, because in many ways his
words have guided me for much longer. I was twenty when I first read Woven
Stone, at a time when I was shuffling off the heavy shame I felt as a mixed-blood
Cherokee hillbilly from a poor mountain town, and Simon's deep love of land, language, and his
Acoma Pueblo community--the substantive concerns of all his
work--found a healing home in my spirit. It was a while before I read more of his work, as my
focus quickly moved from literature by American Indians in
general to Cherokee literature in particular, but each time I returned to Simon's poems, essays,
and stories, I listened to new rhythms in his words, and new
dimensions to the driving purpose of his writer's voice.
Thus it was with no small bit of
apprehension that I prepared to meet him for lunch on my first day as an Aboriginal literatures
job candidate at the
University of Toronto, where Simon was in his first year as a visiting professor in the English
Department. After all, it's one thing to be inspired by a writer's
work, but quite another thing to risk watching that inspiration vanish if the writer turns out to be
something less than generous.
I needn't have worried, because Simon
was just as I hoped he'd be: kind, thoughtful, and certain in his dedication to the dignified
continuity of indigenous
peoples. Although I was still a graduate student at the University of Nebraska and felt rather
overwhelmed by the rush and bustle of Toronto and the Anglophilic
splendor of U of T, {94} Simon put me at ease during our
conversation. He'd read some of my writing and shared his thoughts on it and made clear to me
that
there was a lot of work to be done in Toronto for whomever was hired for the position. It was my
first personal meeting with Simon, and a memorable one, for
he provided encouraging support coupled with high expectations.
I was fortunate enough to be the
chosen candidate for the job, and in the two years since, I've had many opportunities to work with
Simon on a number of
projects dedicated to increasing the presence, access, and visibility of indigenous people at the
University of Toronto. Rather than focus exclusively on U of T or
even on Toronto, Simon's attention starts with the local but also encompasses hemispheric and
international indigenous concerns. He's given U of T a stronger
name in indigenous studies and provided time, energy, and money to developing or enhancing
projects like the Indigenous Literary Reading Series and the
Aboriginal Studies Distinguished Lecture Series, which bring renowned native scholars, artists,
and political leaders to share their knowledge with the city and
university communities; an ambitious, interdisciplinary indigenous studies journal; and the
development of a critical reference project on the literatures of
indigenous North America.
Simon's work and life are embedded
in the teachings of the ancestors, the traditions and spirits of the land and the people. He has
noted that "we are living
today only because the generations before us--our ancestors--provided for us by the manner of
their responsible living," and this ethic of respect and humility
characterizes everything he does.1 He is an energetic mentor to young native
writers and scholars across North America, leading us toward good creative and
economic opportunities and reminding us by his example that our work is not just for ourselves,
but for all our people today and in the days to come. Never
content to just stay put and speak from the security of the Ivory Tower, he travels across the
world to speak about the continuing indigenous struggle for justice
and provides his poetic voice as a powerful healing tool in that struggle.
As a professional writer and an
indigenous professor, Simon is one of a small but growing group of native scholars and writers
who are {95} reclaiming the
academy for our people, and his example has been invaluable in helping me to see how my own
scholarship can be richly rooted in my nation's intellectual and
cultural traditions. And as a colleague and co-teacher, he has given me tangible teaching
strategies for successful engagement with a wide range of issues, as well
as support, guidance, and friendship.
Simon's influence has traveled far
beyond Acoma Pueblo and will long continue to do so; it is a great honor to have benefited from
his intellectual and
personal generosity. I am a better scholar, a better teacher, and a better person for his example.
There are many others who can say the same.

As a graduate student in liberal studies at Dartmouth, and a recent transplant from St.
Michaels, Arizona, I find myself returning again and again to Simon Ortiz.
At St. Michaels high school on the Navajo reservation, I had Ortiz's epigraph to From
Sand Creek plastered in large black letters on my high school classroom
corkboard.

This America
has been a burden
of steel and mad
death,
but, look now,
there are flowers
and new grass
and a spring wind
rising
from Sand Creek.1

Such words seem crucial for us, in both my American history and my American literature
courses, not only at a reservation high school located one mile west of
the window rock, which marks the capital of the Navajo nation, but to any classroom throughout
the country. Ortiz must be there. Few authors, poets or
novelists are so deeply disturbed and enchanted by the stories that scar and mar the American
landscape as Ortiz. His writing takes us from his tribal home of
Acoma Pueblo, west of Albuquerque, to the massacred site of the {97} Arapaho and Cheyenne in southern Colorado, to the prairies
of the Midwest, across
countless cities, towns, and reservation lands. Consequently we are never unaware of where we
are within Ortiz's lines, and that sense of place grounds us
inseparably to who we are in relation to the country in which we live.
In response to both a discussion of
this quotation and my apparent pedagogy, a student once asked me, "Mr. Duquès, for a
white guy you talk a lot about
all of the bad things in American history. What about the good stuff, you know the `spring wind'
and the `new grass' that's always gotta be there somewhere?"
The question reminded me poignantly of the manner in which Ortiz can in so few words convey
both the horrific tragedy of conquest and colonization, while at
the same time find a space for possibility, a means for recovery that is never about forgetting but
always occurs as a kind of recuperative remembering. He speaks
of "bad things" which are so pervasive in our past, detrimental ideologies that persist today, pain
that lingers, yet with a remarkably powerful sense of courage
and optimism.
I know my students at St. Michaels
need this and can thrive upon the sentiments that imbue Ortiz's work, finding clarity and sense of
self within his words,
which exemplify both criticality and assuredness, condemnation and hope. Likewise, I know I
need them too, in order to remind me as I continue to pursue
further academic studies a long way from the reservation that, for a time, I called home, that
often what is most cogent and essential in fields as diverse and
interrelated as Native American studies, American studies, and cultural studies, is the work that
is done not solely in the name of justifiable bitterness, visceral
reconstruction of the past, and a fidelity to the representation of injustice, but work that sees such
imperative subjects as the means toward reparative
possibilities. What is more, I think that in lieu of the complex dynamics of a post-9/11 America
and planet--where culture, religion, politics, and nationality are
reinforcing binary oppositions with real world horrors--it is necessary for all of us to return to
Ortiz's poetry. We must immerse ourselves in the simple beauty of
his words, remembering what we often forget, acknowledging, as Ortiz tells us, that "repression
works like a shadow," choosing not to overlook what is
destroyed and beaten down {98} amidst those mentalities
that operate under dichotomies that desecrate difference, learning not only from our own past
genocides and massacres, but also recognizing the arduous yet fruitful process, circumscribed to
a site, geographic or otherwise, that is regeneration.2

I think I first encountered Simon Ortiz's writing in Duane Niatum's Harper's
Anthology of Twentieth-Century Native American Poetry. (Many of us, I'm sure,
benefited greatly from this anthology.) I was especially moved by "A Story of How a Wall
Stands," a poem that makes vivid and palpable the sustaining
interrelatedness of family, culture, land, and language. In the same anthology I found "The
Creation, According to Coyote," and was amazed by its multilayered
significances, complex tone, and linguistic agility. After this introduction I knew I would have to
keep reading Ortiz, and I have. His work continues to challenge
and enlighten me and to give me great pleasure.
I could say, simply, that my tribute to
Simon Ortiz exists in my writings on his work and in the fact that I often include his poetry on
my syllabi (thus I also
know of his power to move students to new insights and recognitions). But I would like to be a
bit more specific about just one of the many ways in which his
work impresses: While he never stops advocating on behalf of native people's voices, rights, and
history, and while he never suggests that the future will be easy,
he bravely imagines that natives and others might find ways of living together constructively and
creatively in this land whose history is so deeply, and often so
differently, part of all of our lives. Examining the requirements and the implications of such a
possibility is, I think, one of the struggles that makes After and
Before the Lightning an important book. In this book he exposes historical and
contemporary disasters of Manifest Destiny, but he also affirms the restorative
poten-{100}tial in the human spirit and in the natural
world. He insists upon painful recognitions and hard work--especially for his non-Native
readers--but he
also tells us all that if we commit ourselves to this work we may hope that "The future will
not be mad with loss and waste," that a new dream

When I first met Simon Ortiz back in the early 1980s, a friend and I had gone to visit him at
his home outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. We brought with us
a tree, a sapling, as a gift to honor Simon's newborn son. Now that son and that tree are grown,
but memories of our first visit linger.
Simon asked me if I knew him, and I
said no, except for knowing his work. He balked, as if offended, and said something about how
knowing his work is
knowing him. Then Simon asked my friend to tell the stories back to him that Simon had
told him the last time my friend had visited. Bo was chastised for not
being able, or not having the courage, to retell the stories, and Simon began again, telling us
many of the stories that identify him as human, as Aacqumeh.

That evening Simon would lie down for a while and we would visit with his wife, but just as
we were about to leave, he would be up again, ready to talk, to tell
stories. I love him for that night. I can't exactly say why, except to say that people are most
believable who have a deep belief--not as obvious of a thing as it may
seem.
Although Simon does not drink now,
he was drinking at the time, drinking the way my mother used to drink and the way I have drunk
myself, to obliterate
sorrow while at the same time remaining aware, even intimately in touch with people, places,
ideas. Believe me, I don't romanticize alcohol addiction or
glamorize the longing and loss it entails, and neither does Simon. No. I speak of those three
things together--being known through one's words, the importance
of remembering stories, and climbing on the beast called Grief, a.k.a. Sor-{102}row, determined to ride, to let 'er buck! They are the truth
and fierce beauty I
associate with knowing Simon J. Ortiz Jr.: a child, a tree, a story, a lesson, a life, a sorrow, a joy,
and a raging grief.
Simon knows the howling winds of
my own prairie homeland, and knows them as if he were born there. In "The Prairie's Song,"
Simon writes,

More than anything else
what we want to feel and finally know
is the prairie's song.
With this cored tightly always and
forever enduring in ourselves,
we can know
all manners and dimensions of grief
and we will not fail ourselves (83)

We pray our "poor prayer," as he calls it, when eloquent words fail us and when our pitiful
selves know keenly how pitiful we are.
I love Simon for his insistence on
enduring, "cored tightly always and forever." Those who love Simon's words understand how
that can be because his
"before" and "after the lightning" become more than a season. He invokes a ceremonial space of
grace and forgiveness, healing and remembering and being
beyond all those abstractions into sky gazing and wondering--a gratitude for being alive.

WORK
CITED

Ortiz, Simon J. Out There Somewhere. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2002.

{103}

Telling Our Daughters

ROBERT M. NELSON

There is a certain power that is compelling in the narrative of a storyteller simply because the
spoken word is so immediate and intimate. It was the desire to
translate that power into printed words that led me to write A Good Journey. Simon Ortiz,
preface, A Good Journey

"To Insure Survival," which is often published as a freestanding poem, was also published in
A Good Journey as the final movement of a much longer narrative,
"Notes For My Child" (54-59). The first part of this longer narrative records the interior
monologue of a father-to-be, beginning in the early morning of July 5,
1973, and moving through the taxi drive, the admissions procedure, the waiting room, and
eventually to the birth of a daughter. Around the same time Simon
Ortiz was writing this poem in celebration of the birth of his daughter Rainy Dawn, my own first
daughter, Erin Carlisle, was born. But because it was 1976 and
a C-section delivery, I wasn't present in the delivery room to welcome her into her new life. Even
if I had been there I suspect I wouldn't have known what to do,
what to say.
About a decade later, in 1987, on a
whim I applied to, and was unaccountably selected to participate in, an eight-week NEH Summer
Seminar on American
Indian Verbal Art and Literature. Near the end of the seminar the director, Larry Evers, passed
around a sheet of paper containing the names of a dozen
important Native American poets, and each seminar participant selected one of those poets for a
{104} half-hour presentation. Since I was indisputably
the most
ignorant of all the seminar participants (having read only two Native American novels and a
driblet of poetry prior to the seminar), I had absolutely no basis for
selecting one poet over another, and so I simply accepted the one left for me: Simon Ortiz.
Later that week I read A Good
Journey from cover to cover, mesmerized by the motion of the language but unsure what I
could possibly say about this
work that would matter to my colleagues. As a fellow father, I finally homed in on his poems
about his children, in particular his birthday song to his daughter in
"To Insure Survival." The poem seemed to me to be the very form of my own unsaid,
unarticulated feelings about my own first daughter's birth, some of my own
unfinished business. Had I been witness, I thought, would that I were moved to such
words.
About a decade later, in 1996, I
watched my second daughter emerge into the world of air and light. It was a terrifying moment:
she came forth, howling,
first a pale blue (I thought, Good lord, a Pict!) and then, suddenly and with no perceptible period
of transition, bright red (I thought, Good lord, whose child IS
this?), and eventually, after I cut the umbilical chord and she had buried herself in her mother's
chest, she transformed into the pale complexion she wears to this
day. Watching my daughter come forth triggered a sudden and certain memory of the opening
lines of Simon's poem, in which his narrator describes the
transformation of colors of his own daughter during her birth, changing from "blue, to red, / to all
the colors of the earth" (58). So I wrote to Simon, asking his
permission to use those lines as part of my own daughter's birth announcement, and of course he
said yes.
Then, as now, I read "To Insure
Survival" as a dramatic monologue that is part emergence story, part introduction to Acoma
traditions, part survival lesson,
part prayer, and all love song. In stanza 1, cast in the present tense, Ortiz's narrator insures that
the first story his child ever hears is the old story of the People's,
and every new person's, natural identity with the land. In this case, the narrator fuses the image of
enduring rock with the name of the newborn child, Rainy
Dawn, by comparing her emergence to{105}
a stone cliff
at dawn
changing colors,
blue to red
to all the colors of the earth (58)

The sequence of colors here being identical with the sequence that his daughter's body goes
through at birth. In the second stanza, the narrator assures his
daughter that the Keresan creatrix figure, Grandmother Spider, has been weaving a "life to wear,"
a cultural and spiritual identity for her newest granddaughter
to grow into, ever since the beginning of time and place.1 In the third stanza,
again in the present tense, the narrator restates the identity of his daughter with a
"cliff at sunrise" and emphasizes the child's kin identity with her own mother, whose blood the
newborn child still wears (59). Then, shifting to the future tense in
the fourth stanza, the narrator returns to the story of how spirit beings are working to insure her
survival: he tells his daughter of her kin relationship to the
katsinas, "the stones with voices, the plants with bells," who will gather at sunrise in five more
days to dance welcome to the newest daughter of the People (59).
For the poet/parent, as for Spider Grandmother and the katsinas, his daughter is the latest
incarnation of the ageless project of Acoma cultural survival and
renewal, and her survival insures this joint project of Spider Grandmother, the katsinas, and the
People for at least one more generation.
If, that is, she survives. What is easy
to overlook in this poem is that it takes more than identity with the land and with Acoma
traditions to insure survival,
because, Grandmother Spider's project notwithstanding, life--especially new life--is very fragile.
In addition to the connotation of ephemerality implicit in the
name Rainy Dawn, there is the recognition of vulnerability in the narrator-father's vision of his
daughter being "naked as that cliff at sunrise" coupled with the
tenuous grip on survival he describes a few lines later: "You kept blinking your eyes / and trying
to catch your breath."2 Given such shaky beginnings, whether
this child will successfully complete the transition from womb to world is touch and go.
{106}
This, I think, is why Ortiz shifts from
present to future tense in stanza 4. The shift invites the child to anticipate the dawn of her fifth
day in the Fifth World,
that time when, according to Acoma tradition, the spirit completes the transition begun at birth. It
is, I think, the poet's own attempt to help insure his daughter's
survival, to keep her in his world with words: the katsinas will, after all, return to Acu to
celebrate their daughter's arrival only if she is there to be greeted. This
is also where the poem begins to read like a prayer disguised as a promise, a prayer endeavoring
to become a promise, perhaps every father's prayer for his
daughter upon her arrival. The poem's final line and fifth stanza, calculated to represent the
fulfillment of Fifth World promise, repeats the hope of the previous
stanza in the form of a four-word, four-syllable love song: "Child, they will come" (59).
Four sunrises and five days after my
younger daughter, Ellie, was born, she too was taken outside at sunrise--as it happened, the
morning of the spring
equinox--and introduced to the universe. Because this was Richmond, not Acu, there were no
stones with voices or plants with bells visible to greet her coming,
so we settled for the black-capped chickadee who came to sing up the dawn at sunrise for my
daughter. Thank you, Simon.

NOTES

1. Ortiz, 58; readers may quickly,
and correctly, recognize Ortiz's Spider Grandmother as identical with Leslie Silko's
"Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought-Woman" (1)
and Paula Gunn Allen's "Tse che nako" (The Sacred Hoop 13) or "Sussistinaku,
The Spider, Old Woman" (The Woman Who Owned the Shadows 207).
2. Ortiz, 59; more precisely, the name
"Rainy Dawn" conjures the image of dawn coupled with the blessing of rain. In the context of
Acoma traditions, this
rain can in turn be understood as shiwanna, the ancestor spiritstuff that works for growth and
regeneration. According to Gertrude Kurath, there are four kinds
of shiwanna or cloud people; the gentlest and most feminine of the four is "heyaashi," the
mistlike cloud that sometimes appears around dawn and touches the
earth like fog. See Ortiz's poem "Heyaashi Guutah" in A Good Journey (123).

{107}

WORKS CITED

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian
Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986.

------. The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink,
1983.

When I think of traveling between past and future, bringing things I value with me, there's a
poem by Simon Ortiz that I always think of. He wrote it as the
seventh of his "Forming Child" poems (it is among the poems in his great collection
Woven Stone), at a time when one of his children was forming in the mother's
womb:

7th
ONE

Near the summit, SE of
Kinlichee,
I saw a piece of snowmelt water
that I thought would maybe look
good
on a silver bracelet with maybe
two small turquoise stones at its
sides;
but then, I liked the way it was,
too,
under pine trees, the snow feeding
it,
the evening sunlight slanting off
it,
and I knew that you would
understand
why I decided to leave it like that.
(44)

This has not yet been canonized
as one of the great poems of our age, but it will be--though, for Simon's sake, I hope not for many
years, since it is much
harder to write great poems when people are telling you what a great poet you are and wanting
you to write more poems just like those that came before. We
like what we know, and we want the same when it comes to our favorite poems and songs: play it
again, Simon! But what he has done here is to keep that
memory of a {109} particular place and time, that track of his past, and hand it over to the child.
He has "left it like that," and yet he has also taken it as a gift to
the child yet unborn. He has given it to anyone who can read or hear the English language and
shares the gift of human sight and feelings. It is a turquoise and
silver bracelet put into words, but as with the real silver and turquoise work of Pueblo people, it
is also the mountain, snow-water, pine trees--the natural
world--that are invited to come and live in the work of silversmith or wordsmith, who can craft a
story with a little world inside it like good medicine, getting
across its human and natural and divine gift of meaning.

WORK
CITED

Ortiz, Simon J. Woven Stone. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1992.

{110}

{BLANK PAGE}

{111}

Contributor Biographies

JONI ADAMSON is associate professor of English at the
University of Arizona, South. Her publications include American Indian Literature,Environmental
Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place and an edited collection (with
Mei Mei Evans and Rachel Stein), The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics,
Poetics, and Pedagogy.

SUSAN BERRY BRILL DE RAMÍREZ is professor
of English at Bradley University where she teaches native literatures, environmental literatures,
and literary criticism
and theory. Her last book was Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral
Tradition (University of Arizona Press, 1999). Her current manuscript
is entitled "American Indian Autobiographies: Storytelling and Ethnography in Navajo Country."
She is presently completing work on indigenous women
storytellers and their women ethnographers.

DAVID DUNAWAY, the author of a half-dozen volumes of
biography and history, is a professor of English at the University of New Mexico. Awarded the
first
PhD in American studies from Berkeley, his specialty is the presentation of literature and history
on public radio and television in such national series as Writing
the Southwest, Aldous Huxley's Brave New Worlds, and Across The
Tracks: A Route 66 Story (www.unm.edu/~rt66). Today, Dunaway is leading an effort to
promote southwestern studies at the University of New Mexico.

ROGER DUNSMORE retired in 2003 after forty years
teaching in the Liberal Studies and Wilderness and Civilization Programs at the University of
Mon-{112}tana.
His Earth's Mind: Essays in Native Literature was published by the University of
New Mexico Press in 1997. His third volume of poems, Tiger Hill, Poems
From China, is forthcoming from Camphorweed Press, Seattle, 2004.

MATTHEW E. DUQUÈS is a graduate student in
liberal studies at Dartmouth College. Prior to coming to Dartmouth, he taught high school
English and history at
St. Michaels High School in St. Michaels, Arizona.

ROBIN RILEY FAST, associate professor of writing,
literature, and publishing at Emerson College, studies and teaches nineteenth-century American
literature,
American poetry, women writers, and Native American literature. She has published articles on
poetry, co-edited Approaches to Teaching Dickinson's Poetry,
and is the author of The Heart as a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian
Poetry.

P. JANE HAFEN (Taos Pueblo) is associate professor of
English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is the author of Reading Louise
Erdrich's Love
Medicine and editor of Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems and The Sun Dance
Opera by Zitkala-Ša and A Great Plains Reader (with Diane Quantic).

JOY HARJO (Creek) has published six books of poetry. Her
latest is How We Became Human, New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton). She
has received several
awards, including the 2002 Eagle Spirit Award from the American Indian Film Festival for
Outstanding Achievement, the 2002 Lifetime Achievement Award
from the Oklahoma Center for the Arts, an Oklahoma Book Arts Award for How We
Became Human, the 2001 American Indian Festival of Words Author
Award from the Tulsa City County Library, and the 2000 Western Literature Association
Distinguished Achievement Award. Harjo's first music CD was Letter
From the End of the Twentieth Century, released by Silverwave Records in 1997. Her
new music CD, Native Joy For Real is in release from Mekko
Productions. She is a full professor at UCLA. When not teaching and performing she lives in
Honolulu, Hawaii.

PATRICE HOLLRAH is the director of the Writing Center at
the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and teaches for the department of English. She is the author
of
"The Old Lady Trill, the Victory Yell": The Power of Women in Native American
Literature (New York: Routledge, 2003). {113}DANIEL HEATH JUSTICE is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee
Nation and assistant professor of Aboriginal literatures at the University of Toronto. His research
and writing interests focus on issues of indigenous literary nationhood, resistance, and
decolonization. His indigenous fantasy novel, Kynship, the first volume of
the trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder, is forthcoming in late summer 2005 from Kegedonce
Press. A full-length critical study, "Our Fire Survives the
Storm: A Cherokee Literary History," will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in
fall 2005.

EVELINA ZUNI LUCERO (Isleta/San Juan Pueblo) is a
professor of creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
She is the
author of the award-winning Night Sky, Morning Star.

DAVID L. MOORE is associate professor of English at the
University of Montana. He teaches and publishes on Native American and American literatures
and has
taught previously at the University of South Dakota, Salish Kootenai College, and Cornell
University. He lives with his family in Missoula, Montana.

ROBERT M. NELSON is a professor of English at the
University of Richmond, where he teaches a variety of courses in American Indian literatures.
For several
years he was a co-editor of Studies in American Indian Literatures.

SIMON J. ORTIZ (Acoma Pueblo) is a poet, fiction writer,
essayist, and storyteller. He has received many awards, including the "Returning the Gift"
Lifetime
Achievement Award, the WESTAAF Lifetime Achievement Award, the New Mexico Governor's
Award for Excellence in Art, and awards from the National
Endowment of the Arts, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, and Lannan
Foundation's Artists in Residence. He is currently a professor of literature and
Aboriginal studies at the University of Toronto.

CARTER REVARD grew up on the Osage Reservation in
Oklahoma, where a tornado came through on a Sunday in 1942 but passed by on the other side.
After
work as a farm hand and greyhound trainer, he took BA degrees from the University of Tulsa and
Oxford (Rhodes Scholarship), was given his Osage name and a
Yale PhD, and then taught medieval and American Indian literatures before retiring in 1997. His
books include Ponca War Dancers;Cowboys and Indians,
Christmas Shopping;An Eagle Nation;Family Matters,{114}Tribal Affairs; and Winning
the Dust Bowl. He hopes his New and Selected Poems: Songs of the
Winethroated Hummingbird will be published in a year or so.

KENNETH M. ROEMER is an Academy of Distinguished
Teachers Professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. His articles have appeared
in
American Literature,American Literary History, and
SAIL, and his books include four books on utopian literature and
Approaches to Teaching Momaday's The
Way to Rainy Mountain,Native American Writers of the United States, and
the forthcoming co-edited volume Cambridge Companion to Native American
Literature.

KIMBERLY ROPPOLO, of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek
descent, is assistant professor of native studies at the University of Lethbridge and the associate
national
director of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Her recent publications include
"Symbolic Racism, History, and Reality: The Real Problem with
Indian Mascots," in Genocide of the Mind: An Anthology of Urban Indians, edited
by MariJo Moore; and "The Real Americana," a poem in This Bridge We
Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. She is married and has three
children.

KATHRYN W. SHANLEY (Assiniboine) is chair of the
Native American studies department at the University of Montana. She has published widely in
the field of
Native American literary criticism on issues of representation of Indians in popular culture as
well as about authors such as James Welch, Maria Campbell, Leslie
Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, Thomas King, and N. Scott Momaday. She recently edited
Native American Literature: Boundaries and Sovereignties (Delta,
2001) and has a forthcoming book on the writings of James Welch.

LAURA TOHE is Diné (Navajo). She is associate
professor of English at Arizona State University. She has authored Making Friends with
Water, the award
winning No Parole Today, and co-edited Sister Nations: Native American
Women Writers on Community. She writes essays, stories, and children's plays that
have appeared in Canada and Europe, and has a book forthcoming, Tséyi', Deep in
the Rock.{115}SARAH ANN WIDER is professor of English and Native
American studies at Colgate University where she teaches courses in contemporary Native
American
literature. Frustrated by the ways in which conventional literary criticism perpetuates a colonialist
mentality, she is currently working with other methods of
interpretation that step out of the bounds of academic discourse.